Spiced Iced Tea
4 teaspoons tea. 2 cups boiling water. 9 cloves.
PROCESS: Follow recipe for making tea. Strain into pitcher over cloves, chill, then pour into glasses filled with cracked ice. Sweeten to taste. The flavor of tea is preserved and is much finer by chilling the infusion quickly, before pouring over ice. Allow three cloves for each glass. The large Penang cloves are the best.
A three-glass batch of clove-scented iced tea, built on the book's earlier method for hot tea. The instruction that carries the whole thing is chilling the infusion before it meets the ice.
- YieldTwo cups of infusion and nine cloves, at three cloves a glass, makes three servings. Poured over a full glass of cracked ice it stretches a little further but tastes correspondingly thinner.
- "Follow recipe for making tea"Refers back to the book's earlier method for hot tea, which is not reproduced here. Four teaspoons to two cups is a strong brew, presumably because it will be diluted by melting ice; steep black tea three to five minutes and strain off the leaves promptly or the tannin turns harsh.
- The hinge: chill fastThe note about quick chilling is the point of the recipe, and the claim it makes is about flavour: strain the hot tea straight into a pitcher and chill it quickly in an ice bath or the refrigerator, then pour over ice at the last moment.
- ClovesWhole cloves, dropped in the pitcher so the hot tea extracts them as it cools. Nine whole cloves in two cups is assertive; taste after twenty minutes and lift them out when it suits you, as the flavour keeps building while the tea sits.
- Penang clovesA once-common grade name for cloves shipped through Penang, prized for large, oily, unbroken heads. No modern supermarket sorts them this way. Buy whole cloves that still look plump and smell sharply of clove oil rather than dusty; old ones have lost their volatile oil and will give you almost nothing.
- SweeteningGranulated sugar will not dissolve properly in cold tea. Sweeten the infusion while it is still hot, or keep a simple syrup on hand.
- Cracked iceAt the time this meant ice broken from a block with a mallet or ice pick. Ordinary cubes work, though larger pieces melt more slowly and dilute the tea less.
Iced tea is generally traced to the American South in the decades after the Civil War, and its popularity is usually credited in part to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, though iced-tea recipes appear in print well before that. Its spread depended less on taste than on plumbing and refrigeration: it needed households that could buy delivered block ice and keep an icebox. The clove is the older element by centuries, a dried flower bud from the Moluccas that reached European and American kitchens through the same spice routes that gave grades like "Penang" their names, and here it does the work that lemon or mint does in later versions.