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Iced Tea (Two ounces best Ceylon tea)
Two ounces best Ceylon tea, over this pour 1 gallon boiling water. Stand for five minutes and strain off the tea leaves. When cold pour into large punch bowl which contains a large piece of ice, add sugar to taste, squeeze in the juice of 6 lemons, and add in the bowl 2 lemons in very thin slices. Use a ladle, serve in an 8-ounce mineral glass and add a little shaved ice, a slice of lemon and serve with a straw. Use odd moments to keep the silver bright.
A fountain-scale tea punch, built in a bowl rather than a pitcher. The proportions are sound; the only real trap is the order of operations with the ice.
- The hinge: cool before icingThe tea is chilled first, then poured over a single large block of ice in the bowl. Pouring hot tea over ice dilutes it to nothing and encourages the cloudiness that comes from shocking hot tannin. Let it come to room temperature, then refrigerate if you have time.
- Two ounces of tea to a gallonThat is about 57 g of loose leaf to 3.8 litres, or roughly half an ounce (about 14 g, call it two tablespoons) per quart — a stronger brew than modern iced-tea practice, which is correct since ice and lemon juice will dilute it. Weigh it if you can; leaf volume varies wildly with grade.
- Five minutes, not longerFive minutes in fully boiling water extracts plenty from a black tea. Longer steeping pushes out the harsher tannins, which taste flat and bitter once cold and make the tea go hazy.
- Ceylon teaBlack tea from Sri Lanka, still sold under that name. Any brisk, unflavoured black tea works — Ceylon, Assam or a standard English breakfast blend. Avoid smoked or scented leaf here.
- Sugar to tasteFor a gallon, start at about 1 cup of sugar and adjust. Dissolve it in a little of the warm tea before chilling, or use simple syrup; granulated sugar will not dissolve properly in a cold bowl over ice.
- The lemonsSix lemons yield roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of juice for the gallon. The two sliced lemons floating in the bowl are for looks and a little aroma; pull them out before the pith starts to turn the batch bitter.
- YieldOne gallon fills about sixteen 8-ounce glasses, less once shaved ice takes up room in each — call it eighteen to twenty servings as poured.
- The last sentence"Use odd moments to keep the silver bright" reads as advice about the ladle and fittings rather than part of the drink itself.
Iced tea belongs to the soda fountain as much as to the tea table. American drugstore fountains were selling cold tea punches by the bowl alongside phosphates and egg drinks, and the format here — a big block of ice, a ladle, a lemon slice and a straw — is fountain service rather than home service. The specification of Ceylon tea may well reflect the commercial landscape: Sri Lankan black tea flooded into the American market in the late nineteenth century, sold hard as clean, machine-made and cheap against Chinese and Japanese green teas, and it brews the brisk, dark liquor that survives ice and sugar. The popular story that iced tea was invented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is traditional and does not hold up; recipes for iced and sweetened tea punches appear in American cookbooks decades earlier. What the fair and books like this one did was make it a standard item sold across a counter.