Black Tea
If you wish a quart of tea, put that quantity of boiling water into the teapot, after scalding it. Add four teaspoonfuls of tea. Boil twenty minutes. It is a great improvement to put in a little green tea.--Mrs. S. T. Black Tea.
Add one and one-half pint boiling water to a half-teacupful of the best black tea. Boil gently for ten or fifteen minutes. If too strong, weaken with boiling water.--Mrs. J. R. McD.
Two contributors' methods for the same drink, both built on the older practice of boiling tea rather than steeping it. The measurements are sound; the timings are the part that needs rethinking.
- Do not boil the leafTwenty minutes at a rolling boil extracts nearly all the tannin in the leaf and gives a drink that is bitter and astringent rather than strong. Modern practice is water at a full boil poured over the leaf, then three to five minutes of steeping off the heat, covered.
- Scalding the potRinsing the empty teapot with boiling water and discarding it is not a fussy step. A cold ceramic or metal pot pulls the water well below boiling on contact, which under-extracts black tea.
- Quantities in the first recipeA quart is four cups, and four teaspoons of leaf for that volume is close to today's standard of one teaspoon per cup. Steeped rather than boiled, it makes an ordinary strength tea.
- "A half-teacupful of the best black tea"Victorian teacups varied, commonly holding somewhere between four and six ounces, so half a cupful of dry leaf is a great deal of tea for a pint and a half of water. The recipe's closing line allows for that: if it comes out too strong, weaken it with boiling water.
- The green tea additionMrs. S. T.'s suggestion of a little green tea in the pot adds a grassy, lighter note to a heavy black leaf. Green tea is scorched by fully boiling water; if you try it, let the kettle stand a minute or two off the boil.
- YieldThe first recipe gives a quart. The second gives a pint and a half, which will go further if weakened with boiling water as the recipe allows.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these paired entries under a single heading, each signed with a contributor's initials rather than reconciled into one authoritative version. The boiling of black tea reflects an older English and colonial habit that persisted in American households well into the nineteenth century, a practice often explained by the expense of tea and a wish to draw every particle of strength out of the leaf. The instruction to add "a little green tea" is a reminder that both types reached American ports in quantity through the China trade, and that blending them at home was a matter of household taste rather than something bought ready-mixed. Black tea won out in Anglo-American drinking over the course of the century, and among the explanations offered is that it travelled and kept better.