June is National Iced Tea Month

How do you take your iced tea?

  • Sweetened

    Votes: 7 33.3%
  • Lemon

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Mint

    Votes: 1 4.8%
  • Sweetened with lemon

    Votes: 10 47.6%
  • Other - let us know your special iced tea recipe!

    Votes: 2 9.5%

  • Total voters
    21
  • Poll closed .

Anna Elizabeth Henry

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The earliest iced tea recipes began appearing prior to the Civil War in cookbooks like The Kentucky Housewife.

“Tea Punch – Make a pint and a half of very strong tea in the usual manner; strain it, and pour it boiling (hot) on one pound and a quarter of loaf sugar. Add half a pint of rich sweet cream, and then stir in gradually a bottle of claret or of champagne. You may heat it to the boiling point, and serve it so, or you may send it round entirely cold, in glass cups.”

The Kentucky Housewife recipe clearly packs quite the punch - literally since it's alcoholic. Perhaps this was the first incarnation of Long Island Iced Tea :wink:

Sweet tea as we know it today dates back to the late 19th century when the below recipe was printed in 1879 in Housekeeping in Old Virginia.

"After scalding the teapot, put into it one quart of boiling water and two teaspoonfuls green tea. If wanted for supper, do this at breakfast. At dinner time, strain, without stirring, through a tea strainer into a pitcher. Let it stand till tea time and pour into decanters, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the pitcher. Fill the goblets with ice, put two teaspoonfuls granulated sugar in each, and pour the tea over the ice and sugar. A squeeze of lemon will make this delicious and healthful, as it will correct the astringent tendency."

Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book (circa 1884) published what may be the first iced tea recipe using black tea instead of the green variety, the version we are most familiar with today.

"Ice Tea or Russian Tea - Make the tea by the first receipt, strain it from the grounds, and keep it cool. When ready to serve, put two cubes of block sugar in a glass, half fill with broken ice, add a slice of lemon, and fill the glass with cold tea."

Historians mistakenly give credit to Richard Blechynden, the India Tea Commissioner & director of the East Indian Pavilion, as the creator of iced tea at the 1904 World's Fair. Supposedly, the East Indian Pavilion offered free hot tea to everyone but because of the heat wave no one was interested in sampling it. In an attempt to drum up drinkers, he circulated and chilled the tea through a series of lead pipes immersed in ice. The resulting cool, refreshing beverage was a hit with fair goers.

However, according to the book Beyond The Ice Cream Cone - The Whole Scoop on Food at the 1904 World's Fair by Pamela J. Vaccaro:

"Both hot tea and iced tea appeared on most restaurant menus at the Fair - at the Barbecue, Fair Japan, the Old Irish Parliament House, the Louisiana and Texas Rice Kitchen, Mrs. Rorer's East Pavilioin Cafe, and so on. It is highly unlikely that all these restaurants jumped on the bandwagon of Blechynden's "new idea," and scurried to the print shops to have their menus reprinted!"
Regardless of who the made refreshing beverage popular, Americans by WWI were purchasing special tall iced tea glasses, long spoons and lemon forks to aid their growing iced tea passion. By the 1930's people commonly referred to the tall crystal goblets as 'iced tea' glasses.

A popular recipe from the pre-Depression era comes from the cookbook Southern Cooking penned by Henrietta Stanley Dull, editor of the home economics section of the Atlanta Journal.

"TEA - Freshly brewed tea, after three to five minutes' infusion, is essential if a good quality is desired. The water, as for coffee, should be freshly boiled and poured over the tea for this short time . . . The tea leaves may be removed when the desired strength is obtained . . . Tea, when it is to be iced, should be made much stronger, to allow for the ice used in chilling. A medium strength tea is usually liked. A good blend and grade of black tea is most popular for iced tea, while green and black are used for hot . . . To sweeten tea for an iced drink-less sugar is required if put in while tea is hot, but often too much is made and sweetened, so in the end there is more often a waste than saving . . . Iced tea should be served with or without lemon, with a sprig of mint, a strawberry, a cherry, a slice of orange, or pineapple. This may be fresh or canned fruit. Milk is not used in iced tea."

Today iced tea and its Southern cousin sweet tea is readily available in numerous varieties and packaged in everything from cans to plastic jugs to tea bags for cold-brewing. Please share your favorite iced tea and sweet tea recipes along with any refreshing treats to accompany your tea on a steamy summer afternoon! :cool:
 
OH no I grew up having to tolerate this puckering mess, ' Iced tea ', being inured to suffering. When I was made aware not only did not everyone have to live like this but in a parallel universe called The South they gave their children something called " Sweet Tea ", it seemed to me Northern children were being abused. ' Sweet Tea '? Whose idea was it to miss that?

Never drink anything else now. Have a theory on how we came to suffer up here, insufficiently sweetened tea and Puritans.
 
Iced Tea-The Southern Table Wine

LOL! Excellent name for it - I love it! :thumbsup:

So there was a 19th Century version of Long Island Ice Tea. This is what I love about history. Just when you think that something is "modern", history comes along and slaps you in the face and screams: "Hold on right there! We came up with it first!" :wink:

Everything that is old is new again, but naturally slightly reinvented! :tongue: That Kentucky Housewife must have liked her guests tipsy. Given the amount of sugar the recipe calls for coupled with a whole bottle of wine/champagne, tea punch becomes that sweet drink with way more alcohol than you realize as you stumble out the door into the night!

OH no I grew up having to tolerate this puckering mess, ' Iced tea ', being inured to suffering. When I was made aware not only did not everyone have to live like this but in a parallel universe called The South they gave their children something called " Sweet Tea ", it seemed to me Northern children were being abused. ' Sweet Tea '? Whose idea was it to miss that?

Never drink anything else now. Have a theory on how we came to suffer up here, insufficiently sweetened tea and Puritans.

Blasted Puritan ancestors! Though I will say my dad's family weren't keen on letting the children have coffee or tea or even soda growing up. Tea only when you were sick and soda only behind their backs when you had a nickel to spare. I can't imagine iced tea without some kind of sweetner. A really fine brew hot may taste fine without sugar, but for some reason iced tea needs sugar.
 
Apparently the current popular iced tea - lemonade combination was made famous by golfer Arnold Palmer. Below is a refreshing take on traditional iced tea with a splash of lemonade added.

Golfer’s Iced Green-and-Black Tea


Ingredients -
  • 4 cups water
  • 2 (.05-ounce) bags black tea*
  • 2 (.05-ounce) bags green tea*
  • 1¾ cups sugar
  • ¾ cup fresh lemon juice, approximately 6 lemons
  • Garnish: fresh mint
Directions - http://www.teatimemagazine.com/golfers-iced-green-and-black-tea-recipe/

*For testing purposes, Tea Time used Bigelow All Natural Organic Ceylon Black Tea & Bigelow Jasmine Green Tea.
 
LOL! Excellent name for it - I love it! :thumbsup:



Everything that is old is new again, but naturally slightly reinvented! :tongue: That Kentucky Housewife must have liked her guests tipsy. Given the amount of sugar the recipe calls for coupled with a whole bottle of wine/champagne, tea punch becomes that sweet drink with way more alcohol than you realize as you stumble out the door into the night!



Blasted Puritan ancestors! Though I will say my dad's family weren't keen on letting the children have coffee or tea or even soda growing up. Tea only when you were sick and soda only behind their backs when you had a nickel to spare. I can't imagine iced tea without some kind of sweetner. A really fine brew hot may taste fine without sugar, but for some reason iced tea needs sugar.


Oh my, we did not know what soda was either, unless someone had a picnic or went to a friend's house. Children also had no business drinking coffee, always had the impression growing up it must be a mild, child poison- but for some reason tea was acceptable if it was in a highly breakable porcelain tea cup. Iced tea, too, maybe sugar- that was pushing it. You had to be quick, adding sugar in our house. " That's enough! " Before the spoon left the bowl. We couldn't win, looking back. What was not Puritan was Scots.
 
"Iced tea" rankles me for some reason. In Georgia all tea is iced. That's like saying wet water please.

Here in the past decade or so you are seeing more people ask for unsweet tea then adding artificial sweetener. Kinda blasphemous to me. I don't see the point of leaving out sugar then adding chemical sugar that tastes awful.
 
Whereas in Ohio, it used to be that you were served iced tea without any sweeteners if you didn't specifically ask for sweet tea... not anymore. Because I still think that "unsweet" isn't a word, I ask for iced tea, no sugar... and then inevitably they bring me my iced tea and a container of sugar and sweeteners on the side, because apparently nobody drinks anything that's not sweet any more! [/rant]
 
Sweet tea is made by dissolving the sugar in the hot water while brewing.

Sweetened tea is unsweet with sugar added after it has brewed.

Growing up in Texas, we had sweetened tea at home and sweet tea at my aunt's house. My wife and I gave up adding any kind of sweetener to our drinks in the early '70's, when I started bringing home teas from all the places I visited in the western Pacific while in the Navy. We both enjoy the great variety of tea and coffee flavors and detest the various sweet drinks that pretend to be anything but sugarwater. Teas and coffees are as varied and flavorful as fine wines.
 
Thought I would bump up this thread as June is National Iced Tea Month.

Blackberry Sweet Tea

Ingredients -
  • 3 cups fresh blackberries
  • 1 1/4 cups sugar
  • 1 teaspoon chopped fresh mint
  • pinch of baking soda
  • 4 cups boiling water
  • 2 family-size teabags - these are those larger ones for pots of tea - 4 regular teabags equals one family sized teabag
  • 2 1/2 cups cold water
  • Optional - garnish with fresh blackberries & a sprig of mint
Directions -
  1. Combine blackberries & sugar in a large container & smash with a wooden spoon
  2. Fold in mint & baking soda into blackberry mixture
  3. Pour 4 cups boiling water over teabags & then cover & steep 5- 10 minutes depending how strong you like your tea. Then discard teabags.
  4. Pour tea over blackberry mixture & let stand at room temperature 1 hour.
  5. Pour tea through a wire-mesh strainer into a large pitcher, discarding solids.
  6. Add 2 1/2 cups cold water, stirring until sugar dissolves. Cover and chill 1 hour.
  7. Garnish, if desired.
 
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