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How to Make Tea
2 Teaspoons Tea 2 Cups Boiling Water Scald an Earthen or China Teapot Put in tea, and pour on boiling water.
Let stand on back of range or in a warm place five minutes. Strain and serve immediately, with or without sugar and milk. Avoid second steeping of leaves with addition of a few fresh ones.. If this is done, so large an amount of tannin is extracted that various ills are apt to follow.
A straightforward black-tea method from the era of the coal range, and still sound. Two points of the original technique matter more than anything else: scald the pot, and take the leaves out.
- RatioTwo teaspoons of loose leaf to two cups of water is roughly one teaspoon (about 2-3 g) per cup, which remains standard for black tea. The recipe does not say which tea is meant, though the fully boiling water points to black; green and white leaf want water off the boil, around 175-185F.
- Scalding the potSwirl boiling water in the empty pot and tip it out just before brewing. A cold pot pulls heat out of the water on contact, which works against a full extraction.
- "Back of the range"The cooler rear of a wood or coal range held a steady low warmth. A modern equivalent is a tea cosy, a warmed pot, or simply covering the lid — the point is to keep the brew hot without cooking it further.
- Five minutesFive minutes is at the long end for most black leaf today; three to four gives plenty of strength with less astringency. Taste at three and judge from there.
- Strain and serve immediatelyThis is the hinge. Leaves left sitting in the pot keep releasing tannins and the second cup turns harsh. Decant into a warmed second pot if you are not pouring straight away.
- The warning about re-steepingThe author's objection is to topping up spent leaves with a few fresh ones and pouring more boiling water on — a common economy that produces a bitter, over-extracted brew. Deliberate multiple short infusions of good leaf, as in Chinese practice, are a different matter entirely.
- VesselThe recipe calls for earthenware or china without saying why; metal pots of the period were sometimes held to give tea a metallic edge. Modern stainless steel is fine; the ceramic pot still holds heat better.
- YieldTwo cups, so one generous serving or two small ones. Scale the leaf with the water rather than brewing strong and diluting.
Tea instructions appear in many American household manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often with an anxious note about tannin. The period's domestic-science writers — Fannie Farmer among the most influential — treated tea as a mild drug as much as a beverage, and warned that over-steeped tea caused indigestion and "nervousness." The chemistry behind the worry is real enough: prolonged steeping does draw out more polyphenols, which bind proteins and give the mouth-drying, bitter quality of stewed tea, though the alarming "various ills" belong to their era rather than ours.