Tea Frappe
Put into an earthen teapot, seven teaspoonfuls of the best mixed tea, and pour upon it nine cupfuls of freshly boiling water. Let this stand for fourteen minutes; strain into a bowl and sweeten to taste. When cold, turn into the freezer and freeze.
A hand-cranked iced tea slush from the era before mechanical refrigeration. Two things in the original need translating: the steeping time and the word "freezer."
- The steep is the problemFourteen minutes will give you a harshly tannic, bitter brew. Black tea gives up its flavour in 3 to 5 minutes and only astringency after that. Compensate for the dilution of melting ice by using more leaf rather than more time.
- "Freezer" means the ice-cream freezerA wooden bucket with a metal can, a crank and a packing of cracked ice and rock salt. Cranking keeps the ice crystals fine, which is the whole point of a frappe. Poured into a modern freezer tray it sets into a solid block instead, so scrape it with a fork every 30 minutes as it freezes.
- Mixed teaA blend sold loose by the grocer, likely black with some green. Any decent loose black tea or a black-green blend works; seven teaspoons to nine cups is a little under one teaspoon per cup.
- Earthen teapotPossibly to avoid the taste metal pots of the period could give tea. Glazed ceramic or glass is fine; so is stainless steel.
- Sweeten while hotSugar dissolves readily in the hot infusion and only slowly once cold. Sweeten more heavily than tastes right at room temperature, since cold blunts sweetness.
- YieldNine cups of infusion makes roughly two quarts of frappe, enough for eight to ten small glasses. Serve it in stemmed glasses with a spoon, and a slice of lemon if you like.
Frappe, from the French frapper, to strike, a verb that came by extension to be used of chilling, described any drink packed down in ice rather than a fully frozen dessert, and by the 1890s American cookbooks were applying it freely to tea, coffee, fruit juices and wines. Tea frappe belongs to the same moment as the rise of iced tea in the United States, which is usually traced to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was popularised at large public gatherings, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair being the anecdote most often repeated. Its appearance in a household manual reflects a practical fact of the period kitchen: the ice-cream freezer was already a common piece of equipment, and once a household had ice delivered and a crank freezer on hand, chilled and half-frozen drinks became an easy way to make an occasion of afternoon entertaining.