Iced Tea
Make tea and chill. Serve in glasses filled with crushed ice, adding (if desired) one tablespoon lemon juice to each glass. Pass fine granulated (Bar) sugar. Place each glass on a small plate.
A skeleton of a recipe that assumes you already know how to make a pot of tea. The only real decisions are strength, sweetening and dilution.
- Brew stronger than you would for a hot cupCrushed ice melts fast and will thin the tea considerably. Brew at roughly one and a half times normal strength, or plan to serve over ice that has been briefly rinsed under cold water so it stops shedding meltwater.
- Steep timeThe book gives none. Three to five minutes for black tea off a full boil, then remove the leaves. Tea left sitting on the leaves while it chills goes harshly bitter.
- "Fine granulated (Bar) sugar"Bar sugar is what is now sold as superfine or caster sugar, ground finer than table sugar so it dissolves in a cold drink. Ordinary granulated sugar will sit in the bottom of the glass; simple syrup is the easier modern answer.
- LemonOne tablespoon per glass is about half a small lemon and is assertive. Squeeze it fresh at the table rather than in advance.
- The small plateProbably practical rather than decorative: a glass of iced tea sweats, and an underplate keeps the tablecloth dry. A coaster does the same work.
- YieldFigure a quart of brewed tea for four tall glasses once ice is accounted for.
Iced tea was well established in American homes by the time this book appeared, though it is often said to have been popularized at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a story that overstates the case: recipes for chilled and iced tea appear in American cookbooks decades earlier. Cheap manufactured ice, widely available in cities by the turn of the century, is the quiet precondition for the whole thing.