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Iced Tea a La Russe
To each glass of tea add the juice of half a lemon, fill up the glass with pounded ice, and sweeten.
A three-clause recipe that assumes you already have a pot of strong hot tea on the table. The details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether the glass tastes like tea or like lemon water.
- Brew it strongThe tea is going onto a full glass of ice and half a lemon's juice, both of which dilute and mask it. Brew at roughly double normal strength — about 2 teaspoons of loose black tea per cup of water, steeped 4 to 5 minutes — so the finished drink still tastes of tea.
- Sweeten while hotGranulated sugar dissolves only slowly in a cold glass and tends to settle at the bottom as grit. Stir the sugar into the hot tea before it goes over the ice, or keep a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water, boiled and cooled) to hand.
- Pounded iceAt this date it would have meant ice from a block, broken up by hand before use. Crushed ice from a machine serves the same purpose; it melts fast, and the melt dilutes the doubled-strength tea back toward normal strength.
- Half a lemon is a lotHalf a large supermarket lemon gives roughly 1 to 1½ tablespoons of juice per glass, which is assertive; start with two teaspoons and add more to taste.
- Glass sizeTumblers of the period were commonly around 8 ounces, though sizes varied. Scaled to a modern 12- or 16-ounce glass, the tea and lemon both need increasing proportionally or the ice wins.
- YieldAs written, one glass. For a pitcher, figure a quart of double-strength tea, the juice of 3 to 4 lemons, and about half a cup of syrup, poured over ice at the moment of serving rather than stored diluted.
Tea with lemon rather than milk is the marker that earns the name: the Russian manner, in which a strong concentrate from the samovar's zavarka pot is cut with hot water and taken with lemon and sugar, was widely known in Britain and North America by the mid-nineteenth century, and "à la Russe" attached itself to almost any lemon-and-no-milk service. Icing it is usually said to be the North American contribution. Iced tea is securely attested in English-language cookbooks from the 1870s onward, with scattered and less certain earlier appearances, and became commonplace as commercial ice harvesting and home ice-boxes spread through the 1870s and 1880s — exactly the decades in which The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto from contributions by local women. The recipe's brevity is itself informative: pounded ice was assumed to be available in a middle-class household, and no one needed to be told how to make tea.