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Quaker Drink
3 sprigs of mint
Juice of 3 oranges
3 cups tea infusion
½ teaspoon powdered ginger
Juice of 3 lemons
2 cups cold water
Bruise mint in a pitcher and pour the tea over the fruit-juice, ginger mixed with two tablespoons hot water and the cold water. Chill and serve.
A tart, unsweetened iced tea punch from the era when a hostess needed something to serve that was not wine. It comes together in five minutes, but two things in the original need attention: the tea strength and the missing sugar.
- Tea infusionThis means brewed black tea, not tea leaves or concentrate. Three cups of ordinary strength brew works, though since it will be diluted by two cups of water and roughly two cups of juice, brewing it somewhat strong keeps the tea from disappearing entirely. Cool it before combining so the citrus does not turn dull.
- No sugar is listedSix citrus fruits against five cups of liquid makes a genuinely sharp drink. Most cooks today will want 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar dissolved into the hot tea, or an equivalent simple syrup added at the end.
- Ginger needs a slurryPowdered ginger will not disperse in cold liquid; it floats and clumps. The instruction to mix it with two tablespoons of hot water first is the hinge of the recipe, and skipping it leaves gritty specks throughout. Stir it to a smooth paste before it goes in.
- Bruising the mintPress the sprigs against the side of the pitcher with a spoon until they smell strongly, then stop. Shredding or muddling mint to a pulp releases bitterness from the stems and leaves green flecks in the glass.
- Strain before servingThe original leaves the mint and any citrus pulp in the pitcher. Pouring through a fine sieve into a second pitcher after chilling gives a clearer drink and stops the mint from going brown and grassy over an hour or two.
- YieldAbout 1 3/4 quarts, or six to seven modest glasses. Chill the pitcher rather than adding ice to it; ice in the pitcher waters the drink down as it sits, so pour over ice in the glass instead.
Butterick's beverage chapter belongs to the height of the American temperance movement, when a household that kept no wine still needed something to hand round on a warm afternoon. Drinks like this one sit in a large family of early twentieth-century fruit-and-tea punches, often likened to what would later be sold as Russian tea or bottled as iced tea; the pattern of tea, citrus juice, mint and a warming spice recurs across period cookbooks with only the spice changed. The powdered ginger is worth noting for the heat and the little bite it supplies to a drink that has no alcohol in it. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the home sewer and housekeeper alike, aimed squarely at this kind of thrifty, respectable entertaining.