Iced Tea
Prepare tea in the morning, making it stronger and sweeter than usual; strain and pour into a clean stone jug or glass bottle, and set aside in the ice-chest until ready to use. Drink from goblets without cream. Serve ice broken in small pieces on a platter nicely garnished with well-washed grape-leaves. Iced tea may be prepared from either green or black alone, but it is considered an improvement to mix the two. Tea made like that for iced tea (or that left in the tea-pot after a meal), with sugar to taste, a slice or two of lemon, a little of the juice, and some pieces of cracked ice, makes a delightful drink. Serve in glasses.
The fresher they are the better and more wholesome, though new-laid eggs require to be cooked longer than others. Eggs over a week old will do to fry, but not to boil. In boiling, they are less likely to crack if dropped in water not quite to the boiling point. Eggs will cook soft in three minutes, hard in five, very hard (to serve with salads, or to slice thin-seasoned well with pepper and salt and put between thin slices of bread and butter) in ten to fifteen minutes. There is an objection to the ordinary way of boiling eggs not generally understood. The white, under three minutes rapid cooking, is toughened and becomes indigestible, and yet the yolk is left uncooked. To be wholesome, eggs should be cooked evenly to the center, and this result is best reached by putting the eggs into a dish having a tight cover (a tin pail will do) , and pouring boiling water over them in the proportion of two quarts to a dozen eggs; cover, and set away from the stove; after cooking about seven minutes remove cover, turn the eggs, replace cover, and in six or seven minutes they will be done if only two or three eggs; if more, in about ten minutes. The heat of the water cooks the eggs slowly to a jelly-like consistency, and leaves the yolk harder than the white. The egg thus cooked is very nice and rich . To fry eggs, after frying ham, drop one by one in the hot fat and dip it over them, until the white is set; dust with pepper and salt , and serve hot; cook from three to five minutes, according to taste .
Put eggs in water in a vessel with a smooth level bottom, to tell good from bad; those which lie on the side are good, but reject (145) those which stand on end as bad; or, look through each egg separately toward the sun, or toward a lamp in a darkened room; if the white looks clear, and the yolk can be easily distinguished, the egg is good; if a dark spot appears in either white or yolk, it is stale; if they appear heavy and dark, or if they gurgle when shaken gently, they are "totally depraved." The best and safest plan is to break each egg in a saucer before using. For preserving eggs for winter use, always secure fresh ones; after packing, cover closely and keep in a cool place.
A pre-refrigeration method: brew hot in the morning, chill through the day, and serve over cracked ice. It works well, with a couple of adjustments to how tea behaves when it sits.
- Brew stronger, but not longerIncrease the leaf rather than the steeping time — roughly half again as much tea as for a hot pot. Over-steeping black tea past four or five minutes extracts tannin that turns harsh and cloudy once chilled.
- Sweeten while hotThe instruction to make it sweeter than usual is easiest to follow while the tea is hot, since sugar dissolves far more slowly in cold liquid. Sugar also reads as less sweet when the drink is very cold, which may be why the original calls for more than usual.
- CloudinessChilled tea often goes hazy. Letting it come to room temperature before it goes into the refrigerator tends to keep it clearer; the haze is harmless either way.
- The ice-chestAn ice-chest ran warmer and less steadily than a modern refrigerator. Brewed tea keeps a couple of days refrigerated; a morning brew for an afternoon drink is exactly right.
- Green and black togetherThe recommended blend still holds up. Brew them separately if you can — green wants water around 175F and two to three minutes, black wants boiling water and longer — then combine.
- The stone jugThe recipe calls for a clean stoneware jug or glass bottle. Tea takes up odours and reacts with bare metal, so use glass, glazed ceramic or stainless steel; avoid aluminium and plastic that has held anything else.
- Grape leavesPurely a garnish for the ice platter. If you want to use them, pick unsprayed leaves and wash them well, as the original insists.
- QuantityNo yield is given. A quart of strong brewed tea fills four goblets once ice is allowed for.
Iced tea appears in American cookbooks over the course of the nineteenth century — tea punches show up earlier and recognisable iced tea recipes are securely attested from the 1870s — and by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled it was firmly a Southern household habit rather than a novelty — the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair story that credits a single vendor with inventing it is popular but demonstrably late. What made it practical was the ice trade: commercial ice, cut from northern lakes and shipped south, put a filled ice-chest within reach of ordinary town households in the second half of the century, and recipes like this one assume both the chest and a platter of cracked ice at the table. The direction to drink it from goblets without cream may hint at a break from hot tea service, and the lemon variation at the end is the ancestor of the standard glass served across the South today.