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Tea Frappe
Upon 6 teaspoonfuls of mixed tea pour 2 quarts of freshly boiling water, stand for 10 minutes, strain off and sweeten to taste. When cold, freeze.
A soda-fountain frappé is a drink frozen only to a slush, not a solid block. Everything here turns on how far you take the freezing and how long you leave the leaves in.
- "Freeze" means slushA frappé is frozen only to a soft, spoonable state, not solid, so this was presumably churned or stirred only until it thickened. Frozen hard in a modern freezer it becomes a tea ice cube. Freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes, or churn briefly in an ice cream machine.
- Mixed teaA shop blend rather than a single-origin leaf; period "mixed" teas could combine black and green as well as different black leaves. Any brisk black blend works; English Breakfast is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- Ten minutes is a long steepBlack tea steeped ten minutes at full boil is markedly tannic and bitter, though dilution by ice and added sugar would have masked some of that. Four to five minutes gives a cleaner base; strain the leaves out completely either way.
- StrengthSix teaspoons to two quarts is about 12 g of leaf to 1.9 litres, which is light by iced-tea standards. If you shorten the steep, raise the leaf to eight or nine teaspoons to keep the flavour from disappearing into the ice.
- Sweeten while hotThe instruction to sweeten before cooling is deliberate. Sugar dissolves fully in hot tea and will not settle out; stirring it into a cold slush later leaves grit. Go slightly sweeter than you want, since cold and freezing both mute sugar.
- CloudinessTea chilled quickly from boiling goes hazy as tannins and caffeine bind. It does not affect flavour, but if you want a clear brew, let it cool to room temperature before it goes near the refrigerator.
- Yield and servingTwo quarts of base makes roughly eight to ten fountain-glass servings. Serve in a chilled glass with a lemon slice, or top with soda water for a longer drink.
Soda fountains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not confined to ice cream and phosphates; they ran a full cold-drink trade, and iced and frozen tea sat squarely inside it. Frappé is the past participle of frapper, literally "struck," which came to be used of chilling or icing, and in the American trade it came to mean a drink frozen to a soft slush rather than a solid, distinct from both a plain iced drink and an ice cream soda. Iced tea's popularity in the United States is often traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, though the claim is traditional rather than documented and cold tea recipes appear in American cookbooks well before that date. What this formula shows is tea treated exactly as fruit syrups were: brew a strong concentrated base, sweeten it hot, chill it, and freeze it to order.