Iced Tea
Make a strong infusion of Larkin Ceylon Tea, allow it to stand not more than three minutes and pour from the pot, as it will grow bitter if the leaves are left in. Add sugar and lemon-juice to taste. Often orange-juice is added also. This makes a very refreshing drink for the warm season.
A brand-promotion recipe reduced to its essentials: brew strong, brew briefly, and get the leaves out. The proportions are left to the cook, so the notes below fill in the numbers.
- The hinge: separate leaf from liquorThe instruction to pour off the tea rather than let it stand on the leaves is the whole technique. Tannin extraction continues as long as the leaf is in contact with hot water, and iced tea brewed long then chilled turns harsh and astringent. Decant into a second vessel at three minutes.
- What "a strong infusion" meansBecause the tea will be poured over ice that melts into it, brew at roughly double strength: about 2 rounded teaspoons of loose leaf per cup of water, or 4 teaspoons for a pint. Use water just off the boil for black tea.
- Larkin Ceylon TeaA house brand no longer sold. Any Ceylon (Sri Lankan) black tea, sold today as Ceylon orange pekoe or broken orange pekoe, gives the same brisk, citrus-friendly cup the recipe was built around.
- Sugar goes in hotGranulated sugar dissolves poorly in cold tea and settles as grit. Stir it into the hot liquor before chilling, or keep a simple syrup of equal parts sugar and water on hand.
- CloudinessTea chilled quickly in the refrigerator often goes hazy as tannins and caffeine bind. It is harmless and affects appearance only; letting the tea cool to room temperature before it goes into the cold, or adding the lemon juice while warm, keeps it clearer.
- CitrusStart with about a tablespoon of lemon juice per pint and adjust. The optional orange juice softens the acidity and adds sweetness; a mix of roughly two parts lemon to one part orange keeps the drink from tasting like squash.
- Yield and servingA pint of double-strength infusion fills two tall glasses once poured over ice. Brew and chill within the day; refrigerated tea loses aroma quickly and clouds further after twenty-four hours.
Iced tea was already an American summer fixture by the time this appeared, having spread through the late nineteenth century as commercial ice became cheap and widely delivered; its popularity is often traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, though printed recipes for iced tea are decades older than that. The naming of a specific brand in the instructions is the giveaway to this recipe's purpose: the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built an enormous mail-order trade in soap and groceries, teas among them, and its promotional cookery pamphlets folded the products into the recipes. Ceylon tea itself was a relatively new arrival on the mass market. Sri Lanka's plantations had turned from coffee to tea only in the 1870s and 1880s, and by 1900 the brisk, bright Ceylon leaf was widely available and cheap in Britain, while in America green teas from Japan and China still held a large share of the market well into the early twentieth century.