Small Wire-Mesh Tea Strainer with Twin Cup Rests and Red-Painted Wooden Handle, c. 1940–1960

The Piece

A small handled tea strainer, the working end a shallow cone of fine woven wire mesh set into a rolled metal rim.

Two wire rests project from the rim, bent into flattened diamond shapes and standing out at right angles, so the strainer can be laid across the top of a cup and let go of.

The shank runs back from the rim as a length of wire bent into a double diamond — a flattened lozenge worked into the middle of the stem, which stiffens it and keeps it from twisting — before entering a plain metal ferrule.

The handle is shaped wood painted a strong cherry red, with a hanging hole drilled through the end, worn through to bare pale wood at the ferrule and along the gripping edge.

A white rubber band is wrapped around the middle of the handle. It is not original, and it has been left where a previous owner put it.

History & Provenance

The strainer exists because of the tea bag's absence, and its decline is the tea bag's fault.

The problem it solves is specific. Early Chinese tea leaves were large enough to open up and stay in the pot. What created the need for straining was the British plantation tea grown in India, whose smaller, more fragile leaves broke up and came through the spout into the cup. The Victorians answered with the handled strainer basket that rests across a cup while the tea is poured — the exact object this is.

By the nineteenth century the market had split the way it always does: Tiffany & Co. was making sterling silver strainers for people who could afford them, and stainless steel versions served everybody else.

Then the tea bag arrived and made the whole category almost unnecessary. Thomas Sullivan usually gets the credit for 1908, but the better story is that Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren of Milwaukee filed a patent for a “tea leaf holder” seven years before he did. Two women got there first and have spent a century being left out of the sentence.

The twin rests are the detail that separates a good strainer from a bad one. Without them the strainer has to be held over the cup through the whole pour, one-handed, while the other hand manages a full pot. With them it sits on the rim and stays there, and both hands are free.

The handle dates it. American and British kitchenware of the 1930s ran to bright Catalin and other coloured plastics on handles. This has none — it has shaped wood under paint, with a plain metal ferrule. Plastics went to the war effort, wood came back as the substitute, and painted wooden handles stayed standard through the years immediately after. Dated on the wooden handle, the ferrule and the hand-bent wire shank: c. 1940–1960.

The strainer carries no legible maker's name on the rim, the shank, the ferrule or the handle, and is offered unattributed.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Anybody who has moved from bags to loose-leaf tea needs one of these on about day two, and the old ones are better than the new ones.

The mesh on this is genuinely fine, which is the only thing that matters — it catches the small broken leaf that modern coarse strainers let straight through. The two rests mean it stays put on the cup while you pour with both hands. And it is small, so it suits a single cup rather than demanding a full pot.

It is not only for tea. The same strainer dusts icing sugar or cocoa over a small tart, rinses a handful of capers or berries, strains a cocktail, or catches lemon pips going into a dressing.

Hung by its hole on a rail or a cup hook, it also just looks right. Red, pale worn wood and grey wire is a full kitchen palette in one small object, and the wear on the handle is the part people notice — somebody held this the same way, several thousand times.

A note on care, and with a mesh strainer there is one rule that decides how long it lasts. Rinse it immediately after use and dry it at once. Tannin dries hard in a fine mesh and blocks it permanently, and water left sitting in the weave rusts it from the inside.

Do not put it in a dishwasher and do not leave it to soak. Either will swell the wooden handle off its ferrule and lift the remaining paint. Wash the mesh under a hot tap with a soft brush, keeping the handle out of the water, and stand it to dry with the cone downward so nothing pools in it.

Never push a spoon or anything hard through the mesh to clear it — the weave stretches and will not go back. Store it dry and hanging rather than in a drawer, where the rests get bent and the cone gets crushed.