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Iced Tea (Take ounces best black tea)
Take 3 ounces best black tea, 5 ounces best green tea, 16 ounces boiling water. Coarsely powder the tea in a mortar; drop it loosely in a covered percolator; pour on the boiling water and cover tightly. Macerate for a few minutes and then percolate till exhausted, using boiling water, sufficient to give about 20 to 24 ounces of percolate. In this dissolve by agitation, 3 pounds of granulated sugar. Use 1 ounce of this syrup mixed with the juice of ¼ of a lemon, for each glass of iced tea, which may be made with soda water or plain ice water.
This is a fountain syrup, not a pitcher of tea: a concentrated tea extract carried in sugar, meant to be dispensed an ounce at a time. The numbers only make sense once you notice that the tea is weighed and the water is measured by volume.
- Which ounces are whichThe 3 oz black and 5 oz green tea are weights: 8 oz of dry leaf, roughly 225 g if avoirdupois, nearer 250 g if the book intends apothecaries' ounces. The 16 ounces of boiling water and the 20 to 24 ounces of percolate are fluid ounces, so 2 cups on and 2½ to 3 cups off.
- "Percolator" means the pharmacist's coneNot a stovetop coffee pot. A drug percolator is a tapering glass or metal cone packed with the powdered material, water added on top, the extract drawn off the bottom valve and fresh water added until the drug is spent. A drip cone lined with a paper filter or a fine muslin bag in a funnel does the same job.
- The hinge: don't chase "till exhausted"Repeated passes of boiling water through powdered leaf pull out tannin long after the flavour is gone, and the result is astringent and metallic. Stop at 20 to 24 fl oz of extract, which is the upper limit the recipe itself sets, and discard the leaf rather than pressing it.
- The sugar is at the edge of solubilityThree pounds of sugar into roughly 22 fl oz of liquid is about as much as water will hold at room temperature. Expect it to need gentle warming to go in, and expect crystals in the bottle after a few days in a cool cupboard. Fountain syrups were often cut thinner than this.
- Green tea, and a lot of itGreen outweighs black here five to three, and both are ground in a mortar. Powdered green tea gives up its bitterness fast, so grind coarsely as directed rather than to dust.
- Yield and servingYou finish with roughly 3 pints of syrup, and at 1 fl oz per glass that is about 45 to 50 drinks. Each glass is that ounce of syrup, the juice of a quarter lemon, and 6 to 8 oz of soda water or iced water over ice — sweet by modern standards, so taste before committing.
- Keeping itA syrup this dense resists spoilage but not surface mould once it is opened and repeatedly ladled from. Bottle it hot into clean bottles, refrigerate, and use within a few weeks; the tea flavour dulls well before the sugar gives out.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were written for druggists, which is why the method is straight out of the pharmacopoeia: coarse powdering in a mortar, maceration, then percolation "till exhausted" is exactly how a nineteenth-century pharmacist made a fluid extract of any botanical. Tea simply took its turn alongside sarsaparilla and ginger. The proportions are suggestive too — American drinkers favoured green tea for most of the nineteenth century, and it is tempting, though no more than that, to read a formula that puts green ahead of black as catching that habit before black-tea iced tea became standard. Popular accounts often trace iced tea to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, but iced and sweetened tea punches appear in American cookbooks decades earlier; what the fair and fountains like this one did was make it a drink you bought by the glass.