Iced Tea
After scalding the teapot, put into it one quart of boiling water and two teaspoonfuls green tea. If wanted for supper, do this at breakfast. At dinner time, strain, without stirring, through a tea-strainer into a pitcher. Let it stand till tea time and then pour into decanters, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the pitcher. Fill the goblets with ice, put two teaspoonfuls granulated sugar in each, and purr the tea over the ice and sugar. A squeeze of lemon will make this delicious and healthful, as it will correct the astringent tendency.--Mrs. S. T.
A pre-1900 iced tea, built on an all-day steep and green rather than black leaf. Two details do most of the work: the tea is never stirred or squeezed, and it is poured over sugar and ice at the last moment.
- The long steep is the whole method, and the reason for the caveatsBoiling water left on green tea from breakfast until dinner extracts heavily, which is why the recipe mentions an astringent tendency and offers lemon to correct it. If you want the period result, follow it; if you want the drink to be pleasant, steep green leaf in water at about 175F for three minutes, then chill.
- "Purr" is a printer's errorRead it as "pour." The tea goes over the ice and sugar in the goblet, not the other way round.
- Never stir or pressDo not stir -- Straining without stirring, then decanting off the sediment, is deliberate. Agitating a long-steeped leaf lifts fine particles and can turn the tea cloudy.
- Strength and yieldOne quart with two teaspoons of leaf is light by weight but heavy by time. Poured over full goblets of ice it makes four modest servings, or three generous ones.
- SugarTwo teaspoons per glass, with the tea poured over it; by tea time the tea will be no warmer than room temperature, so expect the sugar to dissolve slowly. If you chill the tea first, use simple syrup instead.
- Scalding the teapotRinsing the pot with boiling water before brewing keeps the water temperature from dropping on contact. Still worth doing, and it matters more with a heavy ceramic pot.
- Decanters and gobletsThe point of the transfer is leaving the settled sediment behind, so pour off gently and stop before the last inch.
- The lemonLemon is often said to soften the perception of tannin, which appears to be what "correct the astringent tendency" means. The medical framing is period thinking, not a claim to take literally.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia households and signed many of them with initials, as here. Iced tea is often said to have been introduced at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair; printed American recipes like this one are among the evidence that it was already a settled domestic practice decades earlier, at least in the South, where ice houses and later commercial ice made cold drinks feasible in summer. The use of green tea is worth noting: through much of the nineteenth century green was the ordinary American import, and black tea only came to dominate later, so early iced tea recipes routinely call for it. The instruction to brew at breakfast for supper also reflects a kitchen with no refrigeration and a cook who planned the day's beverages alongside the day's meals.