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Russian Tea
Prepare tea, serving a thin slice of lemon and sugar with each cup.
Barely a recipe at all — the whole method is in the word "prepare" — but the proportions and the service are what matter here.
- What "tea" means in this bookWhat "tea" means here -- The entry does not say. A strong black tea is the likely intent for a lemon service; general practice is roughly a teaspoon of leaf per cup with water just off the boil, steeped a few minutes, since longer steeping pulls out tannin that lemon then makes harsh rather than bright.
- Lemon and milk do not share a cupAcid curdles dairy, and this entry accordingly offers lemon and sugar only. Serve the two on a saucer or a small dish and let each person add them.
- Filed under Frozen DishesPlacement -- The entry itself says nothing about ice, chilling, or when in the meal it was served; any iced reading is conjecture. If you do ice it, brew stronger, since melting ice dilutes fast.
- SugarThe entry does not say which sugar. Loaf or cut sugar was commonly served with tea in this period; granulated dissolves faster in an iced glass. A lump is roughly a teaspoon.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Figure six ounces of brewed tea and one thin lemon wheel per person, with the pot held on a warmer rather than left over direct heat, which stews the leaf.
Tea with lemon rather than milk is the Russian habit, and the English-speaking world named the style after it: by the late nineteenth century "Russian tea" on an American menu meant a clear cup with a lemon slice, and it was customary to sweeten it with jam or serve it from a samovar. Later American cookbooks would attach the name to a spiced punch of tea with orange, clove and cinnamon, but that development is largely a twentieth-century one and has nothing to do with this entry. Lowney's, a chocolate company that issued its cook book to sell cocoa, includes it as part of a general beverage repertoire.