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De John's Tea
Follow recipe for making tea and serve hot, allowing three whole cloves to each cup. Sugar is added according to taste.
A clove-spiced tea that assumes you already know the book's basic method. The whole point is the infusion time of the cloves, which is longer than most people expect.
- The base methodThe recipe leans on the book's own tea entry, which is not reproduced here. Period tea methods typically involved scalding the pot, allowing roughly a teaspoon of loose leaf per cup, pouring water at a full boil and steeping a few minutes.
- Cloves need longer than the teaThree whole cloves per cup will barely register in five minutes. Add them to the pot with the leaves and pour the boiling water over both, or briefly bruise the cloves first so the eugenol releases faster.
- Do not oversteep to compensateLeaving the leaves in until the cloves come through gives bitter, tannic tea. Strain the tea off the leaves at five minutes into a warmed second pot, cloves and all, and let it stand another few minutes.
- Quantity of clovesThree per cup is assertive by modern taste. Two is closer to what most people want in a six-ounce cup, and the original cup here is likely six ounces rather than eight.
- ServingThe recipe specifies only that it go to the table hot, with sugar to taste; it says nothing about milk, though clove and milk are an awkward pair. A strip of lemon peel dropped in with the cloves is an optional addition.
- ScalingFor a pot serving six, allow a teaspoon of leaf per cup and eighteen cloves at the recipe's rate of three per cup (twelve if you prefer the lighter proportion suggested above). Strain before the second pour so no one gets a clove in the teeth.
Spiced teas of this kind appeared in the beverage chapters of American household books, usually as a small variation on the house tea method rather than a dish in its own right — the writer assumed you had already read the page above. Cloves kept well dried and were a common way to dress up an ordinary pot of tea for company. Recipes carrying a proper name like this one were often contributed by a friend, relative or club member and printed with the attribution intact, so "De John" is more likely a contributor than a place or a brand.