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Tea a La Russe
Pare and slice fresh, juicy lemons; lay a piece in the bottom of each cup, sprinkle with white sugar, and pour hot, strong tea over. Or the lemon may be sent around in slices with the peel on. No cream is used.
A three-line drink recipe with no quantities, which is fine — the proportions are to taste. What matters is the strength of the tea and the order of assembly.
- Tea strength"Hot, strong tea" here means black tea brewed noticeably stronger than you would drink with milk, since lemon and sugar both flatten it. Roughly a heaped teaspoon of loose leaf per cup, steeped 4 to 5 minutes; a Russian-style caravan or lapsang blend suits it, as does plain Assam.
- Pare and sliceTo pare is to remove the peel with a knife. The recipe gives both options in sequence: pared slices go in the cup, unpared slices are passed at the table so each drinker adds their own.
- Sugar"White sugar" in this period meant refined loaf or granulated sugar, as opposed to brown or unrefined. Ordinary granulated is the direct equivalent; about a teaspoon per cup.
- Assembly orderThe lemon and sugar go in first and the tea is poured over them, which dissolves the sugar; where the slices are sent round with the peel on, the hot tea also draws oil from the peel. Adding lemon to a poured cup gives a thinner result.
- Avoid boiling water on the leaf twiceAvoid stewing the leaf -- If you are working from a pot kept hot on the stove, the tea will stew and turn bitter and tannic. Brew in batches or hold the concentrate and dilute with fresh hot water, which is roughly what a samovar arrangement does.
- No creamThe instruction is not stylistic. Lemon juice curdles dairy on contact, so cream and lemon in the same cup will separate into visible flecks.
- QuantityAs written this makes as many cups as you pour. One lemon yields enough slices for six to eight cups.
Tea with lemon and sugar rather than milk reached English and American tables in the 19th century as "Russian tea" or "tea à la Russe," and the name stuck to almost anything served with a lemon slice. The association is usually traced to the overland caravan trade that brought Chinese tea into Russia long before it arrived there by sea, and to the samovar, which keeps a strong concentrate hot and lets each drinker dilute it in the cup. Its appearance in an 1877 Canadian and American household compilation like The Home Cook Book belongs to an era much taken with foreign-labelled refinements, though what a French or Russian tag signalled at the tea table is a matter of inference rather than record. The practical note at the end — no cream — is the one piece of real cookery in the entry, and it is correct.