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Russian Tea
Follow recipe for making tea. Russian Tea may be served hot or cold, but always without milk. A thin slice of lemon, from which seeds have been removed, or a few drops of lemon-juice, is allowed for each cup. Sugar is added according to taste. In Russia a preserved strawberry to each cup is considered an improvement. imitate our Russian friends by garnishing with a candied cherry.
This is a serving note attached to the book's basic tea recipe rather than a standalone method, so the brewing itself is assumed. The whole point is the omission of milk and the addition of lemon.
- The tea recipe it refers toThe book's base method is not reproduced here; period tea directions of this kind generally call for roughly one teaspoon of leaf per cup, a scalded pot, freshly boiling water, a steep of a few minutes and then pouring off the leaves. Longer steeping is what makes tannic, bitter tea; the leaves should not sit in the pot while the cups are being garnished.
- Use black teaA strong black tea is the sensible choice here. Lemon juice mutes the aromatics of green and oolong teas and dulls their color, while it brightens a strong black tea.
- Milk and lemon do not mixThe instruction to serve it always without milk reflects Russian custom, and there is chemistry behind it too: lemon acid curdles the proteins in dairy, so a cup with both goes flecked and grainy.
- Lemon quantityOne thin slice per cup, seeds removed, or a few drops of juice, as the recipe says. Much more than that turns the cup into lemonade and flattens the tea.
- Preserved strawberryThis means Russian-style whole-fruit preserve in heavy syrup, not modern set jam. A spoonful of good whole-berry preserve, syrup and all, is the closest supermarket equivalent; it sweetens the cup, so cut back on the sugar.
- Served coldFor iced tea, brew at roughly double strength and pour over ice, since melting ice dilutes it. Cool the tea before refrigerating rather than chilling a hot pot, which clouds it.
- YieldThe original gives none, being a per-cup garnishing instruction. Reckon on one teaspoon of leaf and one lemon slice for each cup you pour.
Tea reached Russia overland from China in the seventeenth century and by the nineteenth was inseparable from the samovar, which held hot water at the ready and a concentrated brew, the zavarka, in a small pot on top; each cup was diluted to taste. Two habits of that tradition survive in this note: lemon rather than milk, and varenye, the loose whole-fruit preserve that Russians took with tea, sometimes by the spoonful alongside rather than stirred in. The suggestion that Americans "imitate our Russian friends" with a candied cherry marks the recipe as a period fashion note: at the turn of the twentieth century, tea served hot or iced with lemon seems often to have been labeled Russian on American menus, and the name later drifted still further from its origin, attaching in the twentieth-century United States to a spiced orange-and-tea punch made from instant powder that has nothing Russian about it.