While I haven't seen it done in the States, in Russia this is used to be a common practice. What I mean is to drink tea not by adding sugar to it, but by biting off the sugar cubes. Just like this...

I would say more, those sugar cubes are not of proper cubic or parallelepiped shape but rather broken of one great sugar "head" as they put it, a plump of sugar as it comes ou from the processing of sugar beets.

Back a couple of hundred years ago the process of drinking tea was set in a certain way and looked sort of like this...

On the left side of the picture, you can see a device called "samovar" which in direct translation means "boils on its own." Here you can see it more clearly.