Did you or your mother or your grandmother or (like me) your Aunt Dorothy ever use one of these?
For our family it was not a tea strainer but a thingy to put Italian spices in and then hang onto a pot of simmering tomato sauce in the “true old fashioned Italian way,” Aunt Dorothy used to say. She ought to know; she was married to an Italian, Angelo Cicero.
Aunt Dorothy would mix cans of all of these spices in a mixing bowl: rosemary, cumin, sweet basil, oregano, anise or coriander seed, marjoram, tarragon, parsley, fennel seed. Then she’d fill the little metal ball with these spices and add “1 bay leaf and 1 chili pepper per tea ball.”
Her Spaghetti Sauce was the absolutely bestest over! Try it yourself….. if you can find a metal tea ball.
I still use one
I put the spices for corned beef in mine. It works very well.
There are substitutes now. There’s the Tea-tanic, the Mani-Tea, and I have a Kit-tea. It is made out of silicone. They are very cute, as the names suggest. Kitchen stores and World Market usually have them.
I used one for years for tea.