I can’t say with Gospel certainty (let’s stop and laugh at that for a second…) if sesame black tea predates the bubble tea I wrote about last week.  But I suspect it does.  We were eating sesame seeds at least 5,050 years ago.  The Assyrian gods celebrated their Creation by drinking sesame wine.

So sesame black tea with milk needs no gimmick like gelatinous bubbles or Rainbow Brite-colored mega straws!  No, it can be mixed up in a Chinatown bakery, in particular this morning the Dragon Land Bakery across from the perma-shuttered and dragon-topped NYC tourist booth on Canal Street.  The woman behind the counter spoons some of the black sesame tea powder (available on Amazon; who knew?) into my cup, fills the cup with hot water and milk, and drops in a Hong Kong Style-brand Ceylon tea bag.  The exchange takes some miming, fruitlessly precise articulation, and one mistake, but the two of us get the job done.

I take my seat at “Tiny Dancer” replaces “Grease” over the radio.  Everyone else here is speaking, reading, and looking Chinese.  They’re also middle aged or older.  Have all the young people turned completely to the novelty tea shops?  Am I into an old-person’s tea?Because I am into sesame black tea.  Into it.  It’s nutty in that particular way.  With just a touch of sugar, it’s better than any trademarked coffee beverage.  Plus, it’s straight-up tea and thus conveys a manageable amount of plain caffeine. No energy drink mystery ingredient here.

The sesame powder and sugar have settled into a runny gloop at the bottom of my cup.  When Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” replaces Elton John, I eat some of that gloop before stirring it in.  It tastes like the sesame candy you get at Middle Eastern grocers.  I wonder if I can make this on my own.

Like candy, sesame black tea makes me want more.  There are other sweets here.  It is a bakery, after all.  Chinese bakeries have sweets that go by Western confection names – Napoleon, Black Forrest Cake, etc.—but that are nonetheless distinct in that most seem secretly to be injected with Helium.  They expand in your stomach like a balloon or those tiny zoo animals that grow life-sized in your tub.  I assume this is caused by some unfamiliar ingredient in the flour, but maybe that’s racist because I’m just surmising based on Chinese cuisine’s use of MSG.

The baked goods that don’t self-inflate are fired in the heaviest oil of all time (probably not sesame.)  I once bought three sugar doughnuts here at Dragon Land because all three cost only a buck, and I’m often compelled to avail myself of deals whether I want the deal or not.

Each doughnut was just smaller than a baseball.  I ate one and a half.  I was overfed for the next five hours.

So this morning I  will resist the compulsion to eat these things I don’t actually like.  I will instead order a second large sesame black tea with milk, wonder at the contents of the Chinese newspaper being read by the ancient woman across the table, and wait to see what CBS Radio chooses to follow Lionel Richie.