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Tea Punch
Make fresh tea as needed, use a teaspoonful of orange pekoe tea to each cup of water. Boil your water and pour on the tea, let steep three minutes.
Put some ice in your punch glass, fill two thirds full of hot tea, add a tablespoonful of sugar syrup and one tablespoonful of lemon or orange juice.
The different prepared fruit juices may be used, omitting the sugar syrup.
A single-glass iced tea built to order rather than brewed in a pitcher, which is the whole point of the method: the tea never sits and turns bitter or cloudy.
- Orange pekoeA leaf-grade designation, not a flavour — there is no orange in it. Any decent black tea works; use about 1 teaspoon of loose leaf per cup of water, or one bag.
- Three minutes, strictlyThe short steep is deliberate. Black tea held past four or five minutes releases more tannin and turns astringent, and strongly steeped tea is more prone to the cloudiness that can appear on chilling.
- Hot tea over icePouring hot tea straight onto ice chills it fast and helps keep the drink clear. Use a generous amount of ice rather than two or three cubes, or the tea will end up lukewarm — though the recipe's own proportions (ice, then hot tea to two-thirds) leave room for only a modest amount.
- Sugar syrupEqual parts sugar and water by volume, heated until dissolved and cooled. A tablespoon per glass is fairly sweet; the original assumes a small punch glass of perhaps 6 ounces.
- "Prepared fruit juices"Bottled fruit juices or syrups of the period, which were generally already sweetened — which is why the recipe says to leave out the sugar syrup when using them. Modern unsweetened juice will need the syrup kept in.
- GlasswareA punch glass of the era was small, roughly 5 to 6 ounces. Scale the syrup and juice up by half for a standard 10-ounce tumbler.
- YieldOne glass. Multiply the tea by the number of drinks, but brew it in one batch and pour immediately rather than letting it stand off the leaves.
Iced tea spread through American households in the decades either side of 1900, helped along by the cheap ice trade and by the growing availability of black leaf tea from India and Ceylon, which increasingly displaced the green teas that had dominated earlier in the century. "Punch" here signals the additions — sweetening and citrus — rather than any spirit, though tea punches of earlier date often did contain spirits. The instruction to make the tea fresh for each glass fits a wider concern in period cookery writing about tea left standing on its leaves.