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Tea a la Mitchell
Serve a spoonful of orange marmalade to each cup of hot tea. Mate, or Paraguay Tea Put a level teaspoonful of mate in a small muslin bag, which comes in each package of the tea, and pour over one pint of freshly boiled water. Remove the bag, and the beverage is ready to serve.
Two separate drinks run together in a single paragraph: hot tea sweetened with marmalade, and an infusion of yerba mat deliberately kept mild. Both are simple, and both depend on details the original leaves out.
- Marmalade in place of sugarA spoonful of orange marmalade per cup sweetens and flavours at once. Use a bitter Seville marmalade with a strong black tea; stir until dissolved, and taste before adding any further sugar, since marmalade is well over half sugar by weight.
- Which teaThe book assumes a plain black tea, brewed as usual. A robust Ceylon or Assam stands up to the citrus; delicate green and oolong teas are overwhelmed by it.
- The mat bagThe mate bag -- The package this recipe assumes came with a small muslin infusion bag, which the book takes for granted. Modern packaging generally does not. Use a paper tea filter, a fine mesh infuser, or simply strain the leaf out, since yerba mate is cut fine and will otherwise end up in the cup.
- Steeping time is missingThe instruction to "remove the bag" gives no interval. Three to five minutes is right for one pint; longer draws out a hard, tannic bitterness that no amount of sugar covers.
- Water temperatureFreshly boiled water at a full 212F is generally held to scorch yerba mate. South American practice is water well below boiling, around 160-180F, which is why traditionally brewed mate tastes grassy rather than harsh.
- StrengthOne level teaspoon to a pint is very weak by any standard, and far less leaf per unit of water than a gourd of mate would use. Expect a pale, mild drink; two to three teaspoons per pint gives something closer to the flavour the plant is known for.
- YieldA pint of mat serves two cups. Both drinks are caffeinated, mat comparably to a strong tea.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the last months before national Prohibition, when American publishers issued collections of drinks that a hostess could serve without a licence, a bar, or a guilty conscience. Its tea section carries a number of novelties, and yerba mate, the leaf of Ilex paraguariensis, was one of them: familiar throughout Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, and available in the United States in packaged form, complete with the little muslin bags this recipe takes for granted. The marmalade tea is a different kind of borrowing. Sweetening tea with preserves rather than sugar is long associated with Russian and eastern European households, where a spoon of jam is eaten alongside or stirred into the glass, and it turns up in American books of this period under assorted personal names -- "a la Mitchell" here -- which may signal a hostess who served it rather than anyone who invented it.