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Russian Tea
Add a slice of lemon and a little preserve-strawberry, raspberry, etc., to tea, served hot in glasses.
A one-line formula rather than a recipe, and it works as written. The only real decisions are how strong the tea is and how much jam goes in.
- ProportionsThe recipe says only "a little." A teaspoon of preserve per cup, stirred until it dissolves, is a reasonable working amount; much more and the tea reads as fruit syrup.
- The tea itselfBrew it strong and black — a Russian caravan blend, Assam or Ceylon — since the sugar in the jam will flatten a delicate tea. Steep 3 to 4 minutes off a full boil.
- Preserve, not jellyThe point is the whole fruit sitting in the bottom of the glass. A jelly or a seedless jam largely disappears into the tea; a preserve with berries intact gives you something to eat at the end.
- Serving in glassesUse heatproof glass, or stand a metal spoon in the glass first, a common precaution against cracking. Russian practice was to set the glass in a metal holder, which kept the drinker's fingers off the hot surface.
- Lemon and milkLemon and dairy do not belong in the same glass. Take this one black, as intended.
Tea with jam is a familiar Russian domestic habit, and English and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the name "Russian tea" for something usually no more precise than strong black tea taken with lemon rather than milk, sometimes with preserve, sometimes served in a glass. In Russia the jam was often eaten from a saucer alongside the tea rather than stirred into it, a distinction most Anglophone versions dropped. The name drifted again in the United States, where by the middle of the twentieth century "Russian tea" frequently meant a spiced punch of tea, orange and clove, or a powdered mix of the same.