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Plain Iced Tea
This is a favorite drink in summer. Make the tea as above directed, strain from the leaves, and set it on the ice for three or four hours. Serve with broken ice in each glass and slices of lemon.
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A two-line instruction that assumes you have already read the hot-tea entry on the page before it. The only real difficulties are the missing proportions and the long chill.
- "As above directed"The base recipe is not on this page, so the proportions are lost here. A common period convention was a teaspoon of leaf per cup with freshly boiling water, steeped three to five minutes, which is still sound practice.
- Strain promptlyThe instruction to strain from the leaves before chilling is the hinge. Tea left sitting on its leaves for hours turns harsh and astringent as tannins continue to extract, and no amount of lemon or sugar hides it.
- Brew stronger than you would drink hotThe recipe chills the tea and then adds more ice in the glass. Allow for that dilution by brewing roughly half again as strong, or the finished drink is thin.
- CloudinessHot-brewed black tea chilled quickly often goes hazy as tannins and caffeine bind. It is harmless and affects looks only; cooling to room temperature before refrigerating reduces it.
- "Set it on the ice"At the time this meant the icebox, a chilled cabinet rather than a modern refrigerator. Three or four hours in the refrigerator does the same job; the tea keeps a day or two before tasting flat.
- Broken iceIce then came as a block and was cracked with a pick or mallet, giving irregular chips that melt fast. Ordinary cubes are closer to what you want if you do not care to water the drink down quickly.
- SweeteningNo sugar is called for, and granulated sugar dissolves poorly in cold tea. Sweeten the tea while it is still hot, or use a simple syrup.
- YieldReckon a quart of brewed tea for four glasses once the ice in each glass is accounted for.
Iced tea appears in American cookbooks from the later decades of the nineteenth century onward, and its spread depended less on any invention than on the ice trade: by the time this book was published, commercial ice delivery and the domestic icebox had made chilled drinks an ordinary summer expectation in town households rather than a luxury. The drink is popularly traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, but printed recipes for tea served cold with lemon predate that by decades, so the fair is better understood as publicity than origin.