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Iced Tea
Make tea as usual; pour it off the leaves; sweeten to taste, and when cool stand in the refrigerator until serving time. Have the glasses filled with cracked ice and have thin slices of lemon cut to serve with the tea.
A short set of directions that assumes you already know how to make hot tea. The points worth attention are strength, sweetening and the order of operations.
- Brew stronger than you drink it hotThe tea here is chilled and then poured over a full glass of cracked ice, which dilutes it substantially. Use about half again as much leaf as for hot tea, or accept a thin cup.
- "Pour it off the leaves"This is the hinge of the recipe. Tea left sitting on the leaves keeps extracting tannin and turns bitter and cloudy as it cools; decant it the moment it has steeped, roughly 3 to 5 minutes for black tea.
- Sweeten while hotGranulated sugar dissolves readily in hot tea and only slowly and grudgingly in cold. If you prefer to sweeten to taste at the table, make a simple syrup instead.
- Cracked iceThis meant ice broken from a block with a mallet or pick. Ordinary cubes work; the smaller shards chill faster but also melt faster and water the tea down.
- YieldNo quantity is given. One quart of brewed tea fills about four tall glasses once the ice is accounted for.
- KeepingBrewed tea holds well in the refrigerator for a day or two. Sweetened tea left at room temperature can ferment and grow a film; make it fresh in warm weather.
Iced tea appears in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and its popularity is often traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, though the drink was clearly already established well before then, since printed recipes for it predate the fair by decades. Its spread depended less on the tea than on the ice: commercial ice harvesting and, later, mechanical refrigeration made cold drinks a normal household possibility rather than a luxury. The lemon and the sweetening reflect American rather than British habit, and remain the standard form of the drink in the southern United States.