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De John's Tea
We Follow recipe for making tea and serve hot, allowing three whole cloves to each cup. Sugar is added according to taste.
A one-line variation that assumes you already know the book's basic tea method, which sits a few pages earlier. The whole point is the clove, so everything depends on how long it sits in the cup.
- The "recipe for making tea" it refers toThe "recipe for making tea" it refers to is the book's own basic method, printed a few pages earlier: in general terms, scald the pot, allow about a teaspoon of leaf per cup, pour on water that has just come to a full boil, and let it steep a few minutes. Water that has been boiled a long while, or reboiled, gives a flat cup.
- Never boil the leavesBoiling or long steeping extracts tannin and turns the tea bitter and astringent; the cloves will not hide it.
- Three cloves per cupWhole cloves, not ground, so they can be strained out or left in the cup without clouding it. Three is assertive in a modern 8 oz mug; two is closer to the smaller teacup of the period.
- When to add themDropping the cloves into the pot with the leaves gives an even, mild spice in three to five minutes. Putting them in the cup, as written, means the flavor keeps building as the drink cools oward the end it will be quite strongly medicinal.
- Which teaClove suits a full-bodied black leaf and overwhelms green and white teas.
- Sugar and servingNo milk is indicated, and clove with milk is unpleasant; a strip of lemon peel or a slice of lemon suits it better. Serve hot in a warmed cup, since the spice reads harsh once the tea goes lukewarm.
- YieldScales directly by the cup. For a pot of four, about four teaspoons of leaf, four cups of freshly boiled water, and twelve cloves (three per cup, as written).
Spiced tea of this kind was a small domestic economy as much as a luxury: cloves, cinnamon and mace were among the flavorings a nineteenth-century American pantry was likely to hold, and a few of them could redeem cheap or stale tea leaves. Such variations tend to be grouped after the plain instructions for tea, coffee and cocoa, on the assumption that a cook learns one reliable method and then rings changes on it. The name is almost certainly a personal attribution, of the sort that appears when a receipt came from a particular household or instructor; who De John was is not recorded in the text.