You know how much I love bergamot.

Did you know that ever since the 19th C., bergamot oil has also been used to give a distinctive aroma and flavor to one of the most popular teas in the world.

Earl Grey is made from a blend of dark China teas treated with the bergamot oil or peel.

It is always said that the tea was named after the second Earl Grey of Howick, Britain’s prime minister from 1830 to 1834. The story revolves around a diplomatic mission to China, when Grey is supposed to have rescued the son of a Chinese mandarin from drowning. The mandarin was said to have been so grateful that he sent a box of bergamot-scented China tea to Grey in London.

There are several things in this story that don’t add up, not least that Grey never set foot in China and bergamot grew only in Calabria.

Nevertheless, it is certain that the English developed a taste for scented teas at about this time, blending Indian and Sri Lankan leaves, dousing them with oil of bergamot and naming the mixture Earl Grey in honour of their prime minister.

Earl Grey tea is still produced in the same way and consumed with undiminished enthusiasm in England. By the mid 19th C., bergamot was produced on an industrial scale, and harvesting the fruit and extracting its oil involved the entire community in the coastal Calabrian villages between Villa San Giovanni and Brancaleone.

The job of picking the bergamot was given to boys and the youngest men in the villages of Calabria. They used pruning knives to remove any stalks that might pierce or damage the skins of other fruit, and then placed the fruit gently in a basket lined with sacking to give it further protection from bruising or chafing that could cause the oil to ooze from its skin and be wasted.

When a basket was full it weighed about thirty kilos. It was the women’s job to hoist the baskets on to their heads and carry them in from the fields to the fabbrica. Here, the working day began at 4 a.m. and finished at 4 p.m.

The skin of a bergamot is so full of oil that it will begin to seep out at the slightest pressure, so initially it was extracted simply by pressing and turning the peel of the fruit against a sponge. The sponge was then squeezed into a glass phial and the liquid was left to settle and separate.

The oil produced by this ancient method is unrivalled, and according to one ‘nose’ in the perfume industry, the difference between it and oil extracted mechanically is ‘just the same as the difference between a bull and a bullock’.

In 1844 the macchina calabrese, the ‘Calabrian machine’, was invented by Nicola Barillà, and this revolutionized the laborious extraction process. A few bergamots of similar size were placed between two metal cups. The lower cup was covered in spikes to hold the fruit still and the upper one was armed with sharp blades. Two men took it in turns to operate the handle that rotated the cups, and the combination of pressure and the movement of the upper cup made oil and water spray out of the peel and fall into a copper bowl.

Finally, the mixture of grated peel and oil would be strained through woollen sacks that were hung from a rack and left to drip into another copper bowl. All of the copper bowls used during the extraction process were lined with tin to prevent the oil reacting with the copper.

Attlee, Helena (2015-01-05). The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit (Kindle Locations 2412-2422). Countryman Press. Kindle Edition.