Iced Tea
Prepare tea in the morning, making it stronger and sweeter than usual; strain and pour into a clean stone jug or glass bottle, and set aside in the ice-chest until ready to use. Drink from goblets without cream. Serve ice broken in small pieces on a platter nicely garnished with well-washed grape-leaves. Iced tea may be prepared from either green or black alone, but it is considered an improvement to mix the two. Tea made like that for iced tea (or that left in the tea-pot after a meal), with sugar to taste, a slice or two of lemon, a little of the juice, and some pieces of cracked ice, makes a delightful drink. Serve in glasses.
The fresher they are the better and more wholesome, though new-laid eggs require to be cooked longer than others. Eggs over a week old will do to fry, but not to boil. In boiling, they are less likely to crack if dropped in water not quite to the boiling point. Eggs will cook soft in three minutes, hard in five, very hard (to serve with salads, or to slice thin-seasoned well with pepper and salt and put between thin slices of bread and butter) in ten to fifteen minutes. There is an objection to the ordinary way of boiling eggs not generally understood. The white, under three minutes rapid cooking, is toughened and becomes indigestible, and yet the yolk is left uncooked. To be wholesome, eggs should be cooked evenly to the center, and this result is best reached by putting the eggs into a dish having a tight cover (a tin pail will do), and pouring boiling water over them in the proportion of two quarts to a dozen eggs; cover, and set away from the stove; after cooking about seven minutes remove cover, turn the eggs, replace cover, and in six or seven minutes they will be done if only two or three eggs; if more, in about ten minutes. The heat of the water cooks the eggs slowly to a jelly-like consistency, and leaves the yolk harder than the white. The egg thus cooked is very nice and rich. To fry eggs, after frying ham, drop one by one in the hot fat and dip it over them, until the white is set; dust with pepper and salt, and serve hot; cook from three to five minutes, according to taste.
Put eggs in water in a vessel with a smooth level bottom, to tell good from bad; those which lie on the side are good, but reject (145) those which stand on end as bad; or, look through each egg separately toward the sun, or toward a lamp in a darkened room; if the white looks clear, and the yolk can be easily distinguished, the egg is good; if a dark spot appears in either white or yolk, it is stale; if they appear heavy and dark, or if they gurgle when shaken gently, they are "totally depraved." The best and safest plan is to break each egg in a saucer before using. For preserving eggs for winter use, always secure fresh ones; after packing, cover closely and keep in a cool place.
A straightforward make-ahead iced tea, though the page as printed runs straight into an unrelated section on eggs partway through — everything from "The fresher they are the better" onward belongs to a different entry and has nothing to do with the tea.
- Strength and sugarBrew stronger than usual, as the recipe directs; dilution by melting ice is the reason. Sugar is best stirred in while the tea is hot, since it will not dissolve properly once chilled.
- Where the recipe endsThe tea instructions finish with "Serve in glasses." The paragraph on boiling, frying and candling eggs is a run-on from the adjoining page of the original book. Ignore it here.
- Stone jug and ice-chestA stone jug is a glazed stoneware crock; any lidded glass or ceramic pitcher does the same job. The ice-chest was an insulated wooden cabinet cooled by a block of ice, and ran warmer than a modern refrigerator, which will hold the tea longer.
- Green and black togetherThe blend is worth trying, but green tea turns bitter above about 175F while black wants water just off the boil. Brew them separately and combine, or the green will be stewed.
- CloudinessTea chilled fast from hot goes hazy as tannins and caffeine bind. Making it in the morning and cooling it slowly, as here, reduces that; so does letting it come to room temperature before it goes into the cold.
- Ice served separatelyBroken ice is offered on a garnished platter for guests to add themselves, rather than the tea being iced in bulk. Harvested natural ice was not always clean, which may have encouraged the practice, though the recipe does not say so.
- Grape leavesPurely a garnish, and only if you have untreated vines. Any broad, sturdy leaf serves the same purpose; nobody eats them in this context.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Two quarts of strong sweetened tea fills six to eight tall glasses once ice is added.
History: Iced tea recipes appear in American cookbooks by the mid-nineteenth century, and this one belongs to the period when the drink still warranted explaining — hence the instruction to drink it "from goblets without cream," which may have been aimed at readers who knew tea only hot and dressed. Its spread is usually tied to the commercial ice trade: as harvested lake ice reached inland towns more cheaply, cold drinks became less exclusively a luxury of the wealthy. The suggestion to use "that left in the tea-pot after a meal" is characteristic of the book's economy, and the lemon version described here anticipates the drink later associated with the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair — an event often wrongly credited with inventing iced tea, though recipes like this one show it was already domestic habit well before.