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Tea for a Large Party
To make what tea-drinkers call a real good cup of tea take nearly a teaspoonful of green tea for each cup, or 4 teaspoonfuls to 5 cups of water, the leaves absorbing 1 cup. But then there is a second drawing that brings this out.
Four ounces of tea contain 28 teaspoonfuls or 2 cupfuls, rounded np. Using mixed tea, and allowing time to draw to draw 2 cupfuls of tea is sufficient to put into 40 cups of water, or a quarter-pound of tea to 2 1/2 gallons of water, which is the same thing in other words.
The best way to make tea for a number is to have the water boiling in an urn and put the tea in a box made of perforated tin and drop it into the water, which must then be stopped from boiling.
This is a scaling table disguised as a recipe: the whole point is the ratio of leaf to water when you are brewing for forty rather than four. A few of the numbers need checking against modern tea.
- The working ratioA quarter-pound of leaf to 2 1/2 gallons of water gives roughly 40 cups. In metric that is about 115 g of tea to 9.5 litres, or a little under 3 g per 240 ml cup, which is close to standard practice today.
- The volume-to-weight claimThe text says 4 oz of tea equals 28 teaspoonfuls or 2 cupfuls. Those two figures do not agree with one another: a cup holds something like 48 teaspoons, not 14. Spoon counts vary with how the leaf is cut and how tightly it packs, so weigh the leaf rather than trusting the spoon count.
- "Mixed tea"In this period the term generally meant a blend of green and black leaf, sold at a time when green tea still held a substantial share of the market. Any decent breakfast blend stands in; a straight green tea will need the shorter steep noted below.
- The hinge: stop the boilThe instruction to halt the boiling once the tea goes in is the important one. Water held at a rolling boil against the leaf drags out tannin and turns a large urn bitter within minutes. Take the urn off the heat, or damp the flame, the moment the infuser goes in.
- The perforated tin boxThis is a large-format infuser, and the principle still holds for crowds: keep the leaf contained so it can be lifted out clean. A muslin bag or a stainless mesh basket sized to the urn does the same job.
- Steeping timeThe original says only "allowing time to draw." Three to four minutes for a black or mixed blend, two to three for green, then remove the leaf entirely. Tea left sitting in a hot urn for an hour is the usual reason party tea tastes stewed.
- The second drawingRe-infusing the same leaves was normal economy and works best with whole-leaf green tea, which gives a lighter but drinkable second cup. Modern broken-leaf blends give up almost everything on the first steep and the second drawing will be thin.
- Absorption lossThe original sets aside one cup in five for what the leaves soak up. Some absorption is real and worth allowing for when brewing to a fixed number of cups, though a whole cup taken up by four teaspoonfuls of leaf looks like a generous allowance. Add a little more water than your target volume.
Tea urns and perforated tin infusers belong to the era of the church supper, the lodge social and the hotel banquet, when tea had to be poured for a crowd from a single heated vessel. The reference to "mixed tea", and the reckoning in quarter-pounds rather than packets, suggest a nineteenth-century setting in which green tea from China still held a share of the market that it later lost largely to black tea from India and Ceylon, and in which tea was sold loose by weight from the grocer's chest. The careful arithmetic, working from teaspoons per cup up to gallons per crowd, suits a book written for cooks who could already make one good cup and needed help only with the multiplication.