What to eat with it
Red tea, called black tea in the West, is the category most people already know how to pair.
It has body, it takes milk, and it stands up to a plate.
Breakfast is the obvious anchor: toast, eggs, anything grilled.
It also takes butter, which almost no other tea does.
A scone with jam and cream is the standard English answer, and the reason is fat tolerance.
Dark chocolate works at this weight, particularly with a malty Assam.
Dried fruit, especially raisin and fig, matches the dried fruit notes already in the cup.
Smoked food finally works: smoked salmon and smoked duck are both legitimate.
Red meat is the textbook pairing, and this is the only category where that is true.
A Chinese red such as Qi Men Hong Cha（祁门红茶）has a cocoa note that wants plain cake.
Smoked Lapsang style teas are their own case, and they need almost nothing beside them.
Milk and sugar both widen the range, and both blunt the detail of the tea itself.
A 5 g pot at 95 °C gives 3 strong cups before the tea thins out.
Milk at 10 per cent of the cup is enough to move it into breakfast territory.
What to avoid
The failure mode with red tea is not weakness, it is dullness.
Because the tea is strong, people put strong things beside it and then taste neither.
Very strong cheese is the usual culprit, and blue cheese is the worst of them.
Chilli still wins, though it takes longer to win than it does with green tea.
Anything vinegary flattens the malt note that makes the tea worth drinking.
Very sweet icing turns the finish cloying.
Citrus is a mixed case: a squeeze is fine, and a citric dessert is not.
Anything with a strong herbal note, particularly mint and eucalyptus, overrides it.
Coffee in the same sitting makes both drinks taste worse.
Carbonated drinks scrub the palate and remove the finish along with the fat.
Ice is the quiet problem, since a chilled red tea loses most of its aroma.
With milk in the cup, avoid anything acidic.
Two hours after coffee, the palate is still not fully back.
An icing at 40 per cent sugar will turn the finish cloying in one bite.
Sweet or savoury
Red tea is the most flexible category on the sweet to savoury line.
It is also the one where adding milk changes the answer completely.
Without milk, a Chinese red tends sweet and wants plain cake or dried fruit.
With milk, it becomes a breakfast drink and takes savoury food easily.
Savoury pairing is straightforward: salt, fat and protein all land well.
Salt is the one variable to watch, since it turns a malty tea metallic when overdone.
Sweet pairing works through caramel, chocolate and dried fruit rather than through sugar.
Plain sugar in the cup is fine, and sugar on the plate is where it goes wrong.
Honey is the exception and behaves better than sugar at this weight.
Dark dried fruit, particularly date and fig, is the safest sweet partner.
Fresh fruit mostly fails, the way it does with darker teas generally.
Choose the direction by brewing strength: a strong cup goes savoury, a light one sweet.
Salt at 1 per cent of a dish lifts a malty red, and at 3 per cent it kills it.
One teaspoon of honey does more than a spoonful of sugar.
A simple rule
Red tea is forgiving enough that the rules can be short.
Match the strength of the brew to the weight of the plate, and stop there.
A strong breakfast brew wants a full plate.
A lighter afternoon cup wants one biscuit.
Milk and sugar are not cheating, but they do move the tea into a different band.
Once they are in, treat the result as a different drink with its own pairings.
Contrast works well here, because there is enough body to contrast with.
A salted, fatty thing beside a malty sweet tea is the clearest example.
Temperature is worth watching only at the light end of the category.
If the tea tastes metallic, the food was too salty.
If it tastes thin and hot, the brew was too weak for the plate.
When the finish lengthens after a bite, the pairing is working.
Set 3 strengths, light, medium and breakfast, and pair each one separately.
A breakfast brew wants 4 g or more, while an afternoon cup wants 2.
Nothing about this pairing needs very much thought.