I've been enjoying Poirot with my parents during lockdown, and the tea glass set into a holder that he drinks from is particularly intriguing. I love this simple design a lot, but looking up designs of tea glass holders it is remarkably hard to track down just what brand it was. I even used my little grey cells! I'm sure the set designers didn't make a custom glass holder for this show, though it's a remote possibility. I was wondering if anyone had seen something like this before?
View attachment 1416871That is a traditional Russian postakannik served formally in the past to Russian men with black tea made in the traditional manner using a wood fired Russian Samovar tea urn and tea pot set. For what ever reason known to the author, Agatha Christie, she decided to give her little Belgian detective a passion for drinking his tea from one of those unique, traditional formal Russian tea ceremony tea sets. If you do a search on eBay for Russian Podstakannik you’ll readily find numerous examples for sale. The traditional glass fitted into the various styles of all the metal handle equipped holders are made of very light gray tinted glass with vertical fluting around the circumference with a smooth lip portion at the top. The shape in profile of the glasses is noticeably tapered. In the formal Russian tea ceremony the women always drank their tea from classic style tea cups and saucers. In informal country settings the tradition was for the men to use tea cups and saucers like the women, but they would poor the very hot tea out of the cup and into the saucer. They would gently blow across the surface of the tea and then drink it from the saucer - at times to the delight of the assembled family.
