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Iced Tea with Ginger Ale
Bring to boiling point 1 quart fresh cold water. Add 4 individual tea bags or 4 heaping teaspoons Orange Pekoe tea. Cover and let stand 2 minutes. Strain over a Large piece of ice. Just before serving add 1 quart ginger ale. Serve with Sugared lemon slices.
A two-ingredient party punch that depends entirely on brewing strength and dilution. The tea is deliberately made strong and short so the ginger ale can cut it in half without tasting like water.
- The hinge: two minutes onlyFour bags to a quart is about the usual one-per-cup rate, and with the ginger ale halving it, the short steep is what keeps the base from turning harsh. A longer steep at this ratio gives a tannic base that no amount of ginger ale will rescue.
- "Bring to boiling point"Add the tea as soon as the water reaches the boil rather than letting it sit at a rolling boil; the traditional reasoning is that prolonged boiling drives off dissolved air and flattens the flavour. Cover while steeping, as directed, to hold the temperature.
- Orange PekoeA leaf-size grade, not a flavour and not an orange-flavoured tea. Any brisk black tea of the sort sold as breakfast blend does the same job; there is no citrus in it.
- "A large piece of ice"Most likely a block or large chunk of the kind an icebox household would have had, which chills without diluting much. A few large cubes or a frozen ring in a punch bowl are the modern equivalent; a bowl of small cubes will melt into the drink and thin it.
- Ginger ale then and nowIn the period when the pale dry style dominated in North America, ginger ale was generally less sweet than most supermarket brands today. A dry ginger ale gives the balance intended.
- Add it last, and coldChill the ginger ale separately and pour it in at the table. Combining it with warm or even cool tea in advance leaves a flat drink by the time it is served.
- Sugared lemon slicesCut thin rounds, dip both faces in granulated sugar and lay them on the surface or on the rim.
- YieldTwo quarts finished before any ice melt: a dozen or so small punch cups, or six tall glasses if served over more ice.
Alice Bradley's little books of luncheon and supper menus belong to a period when iced tea lengthened with ginger ale was a familiar standard of the punch bowl. Ginger ale itself was doing enormous business in the 1920s, both on its own and as a mixer, and the pale dry style then dominant in North America was much less sweet than what the name usually means now. Iced tea had been common in the United States since at least the late nineteenth century, but the individual tea bag was still a relatively new convenience, which may account for Bradley offering it as an alternative to loose leaf and giving a count of bags rather than only spoonfuls.