With sugar and probably with milk. Thomas Short, Discourses on Tea, Sugar, Milk, Made-wines, Spirits, Punch, Tobacco, &c … London, 1750, discusses the habits of taking tea with sugar and milk. Paintings and prints depict tea settings with sugar in sugar bowls, and with milk jugs: example; example; tea sets included milk jugs.

The consumption tea and sugar by the 18th century had become widespread rather than exclusively aristocratic. This of course is in contrast to the Chinese who took tea without sugar or milk. Austen and Smith suggest that "The actual process by which sugar became attached to tea and coffee consumption is not wholly known, but it may have started in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, not in order to sweeten those beverages but rather to encourage the use of tea as a medium for consuming sugar, whose negative effects on teeth and the body were becoming apparent, in a healthy way. However it happened, sometime around 1700 tea and sugar, like coffee and sugar, became part of the daily routine that increasing numbers of Europeans, especially in Britain, practiced in their homes. Previously, the consumption of exotic beverages, usually without sugar, had taken place in aristocratic gatherings or in coffeehouses and teahouses," Ralph A. Austen and Woodruff D. Smith, "Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue: The Slave-Sugar Triangle, Consumerism, and European Industrialization," in Joseph Inikori & Stanley Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on the Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1992), 191.