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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, or a candied cherry to each cup is considered an improvement.
A finishing method rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have already brewed tea by the book's earlier instruction, and tells you what goes in the cup.
- The base teaThe referenced "recipe for making tea" is not reproduced here; tea instructions in books of this period generally call for a scalded pot, roughly a teaspoon of loose black tea per cup, and boiling water left to stand three to five minutes. Longer steeping tends to make tea bitter rather than stronger.
- No milk, and whyThe instruction is not just custom. Lemon juice curdles the proteins in dairy, so milk and lemon in the same cup will separate. Choose one.
- Served coldFor the iced version, brew at double strength and pour over ice, or the drink turns thin and papery as the ice melts. Sweeten while the tea is hot so the sugar dissolves.
- The preserved fruitA whole strawberry in syrup or a candied cherry sits in the bottom of the glass and sweetens the last mouthfuls. Use fruit in heavy syrup rather than a glacé cherry from the baking aisle, which will not release anything.
- VesselIn Russia tea was often served in a glass rather than a cup, so the color shows, though this recipe says "cup." Use a tempered or double-walled glass if you are pouring boiling tea into it.
Tea reached Russia overland from China in the seventeenth century, by caravan rather than by ship, and the habit of drinking it black with lemon and sugar became firmly enough established that English and American cookbooks simply labeled the style "Russian." In Russia itself the tea was brewed as a concentrate in a small pot kept warm atop a samovar and diluted cup by cup with hot water from the urn below, which is why the strength was always a matter of individual taste rather than a fixed recipe. The spoonful of jam or preserved berry noted here is the practice generally called drinking tea s varen'yem — with preserves — sometimes eaten from the spoon alongside the tea rather than stirred in. Here it appears in a bride's cookbook among the beverages, one of several named ways of serving the same pot of tea.