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Iced Tea
4 teaspoons tea 2 cups boiling water Follow recipe for making tea. Strain into glasses onethird full of cracked ice. Sweeten to taste, and allow one slice lemon to each glass tea. The flavor is much finer by chilling the infusion quickly.
A concentrated hot infusion poured over ice — the double-strength method, which is still the best way to get iced tea that is not watery. The book assumes you have already read its base recipe for tea.
- The strength is deliberateFour teaspoons of leaf to two cups of water is roughly double the usual ratio. It is meant to be diluted by the melting ice, so do not reduce it.
- "Follow recipe for making tea"The book's base method is a scalded pot, leaves, freshly boiling water, a short steep, and the leaves strained off rather than left in. Over-steeping makes tea bitter, and a long steep is often blamed for haze once the tea is chilled.
- Chill quickly, as instructedThis is the hinge of the recipe. Tea cooled slowly at room temperature goes hazy as tannins and caffeine bind and drop out of solution; pouring the hot infusion straight onto ice keeps it clear and tastes brighter.
- Cracked iceIce broken up from a block, as it came to a household kitchen; the smaller the pieces, the faster the chill, which is the point here. Crushed ice or cubes bashed in a towel do the same job.
- SweeteningSugar stirred into cold tea will sit at the bottom. Either sweeten the hot infusion before it hits the ice, or use a simple syrup.
- Which teaA black tea such as Ceylon or an English Breakfast blend suits this method. Formosa oolong and green or Japan teas were also common in American households of the period; green tea at this strength and steeping time can turn astringent.
- YieldTwo cups of infusion over ice fills two tall glasses, or three modest ones.
Iced tea is often traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, but that story is a convenient myth rather than documented fact: recipes for sweetened, iced, lemon-dressed tea appear in American and English household books well before 1900, and this entry from the Boston Cooking-School tradition sits in that earlier current. What made it possible was not a fairground vendor but the ice trade — New England companies had been cutting pond ice, packing it in sawdust and shipping it worldwide since the early nineteenth century, so a Boston kitchen in Fannie Farmer's day could reasonably expect cracked ice on demand. The instruction to chill the infusion quickly rests on nothing more than the claim that "the flavor is much finer" — a judgment arrived at by tasting, which is very much the character of this book: measured, tested, and unwilling to leave a detail to chance.