Posted on 06/15/2007 9:47:49 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
More than 140 years after the Civil War ended, a Mason-Dixon line of sorts still persists when it comes to iced tea.
Order an iced tea at a restaurant in the Deep South or Texas, and the frosty beverage set before you likely will be a world away from what you’d be served in New York or Chicago.
Sweet tea, as Southerners call their iced tea, is named for its two key ingredients – tea and lots of sugar. There’s no such thing as an unsweetened sweet tea. And unlike its summer-loving Northern counterpart, sweet tea is consumed year-round.
“About 85 percent of tea consumed in the U.S. is iced. And no one in the world except for us drinks sweet tea, and no one in the U.S. sweetens their tea as much as they do in Southeast,” says Peter Goggi, president of Lipton’s Royal Estates Tea Co.
Sweet tea is something people either love or hate. And often that relationship is determined by geography.
“It’s just very, very sweet. Most people who try it in the North don’t like it,” says Linda Stradley, food historian and founder of food history Web site www.whatscookingamerica.net. “The first time I tried it, I didn’t like it. But then I got addicted to it.”
Why the emphasis on sweet in the South? Stradley speculates sweet tea may have started as a sugar-and-tea punch.
Another theory is that sweet tea may have just been a cheap and convenient stand-in for wine and other alcoholic beverages, which historically were less available and frowned upon in the South.
“Sweet tea has always been a substitute beverage for what wine was doing in other regions,” says Scott Jones, executive food editor at Southern Living magazine.
“The tannins from the tea cleanse your palate, there’s sweetness from the sugar and then the acidity from the lemon,” he says. “It goes well with a lot of food.”
Nonetheless, there is nothing delicate or ethereal about sweet tea.
In addition to the loads of sugar, sweet tea is characterized by an extremely strong tea taste. Sweet tea usually is brewed hot, with tea bags squeezed to get every last bit of flavor.
Sugar then is mixed in while the tea is hot to maximize the amount that dissolves. Water then is added to dilute some of the potency and increase the volume, then the tea is refrigerated to chill.
“Everything they tell you not to do with tea today is pretty much how sweet tea is made,” says Jones, referring to the lower water temperature and more nuanced approach most hot tea drinkers use. “My mom would boil the tea bags in the water, and then squeeze the living daylights out of them.”
It turns out, though, that sweet tea’s role in Southern cuisine is evolving. Twenty years ago, it was hard to walk into a restaurant in the Southeast and find anything but sweet tea.
But increased health consciousness as well as the growth of chain restaurants that cater to a national audience means unsweetened tea is becoming increasingly popular.
“A lot of these old-school men and women who were weaned on sweet tea you now see them drinking unsweetened iced tea with a lot of pink and blue packets,” Jones says. “There’s been an explosion of diabetes in the South, and the doctors are saying you have to cut the sweet tea out.”
But, it’s hard to undo generations of loyal drinkers. Sweet tea tends to be more about memories than health trends or precise recipes. No one, it seems, can quite make sweet tea as well as your mom or grandmother did.
“I make it how my mother made it, with regular tea bags, sugar and boiling water. There’s no new-age tea making kit or anything like that,” says Whitney Sloane Sauls, 27, of Ocean Isle Beach. “It’s just so refreshing and it brings back good memories of childhood and of growing up.”
Sweet tea recipes
While many iced teas are made by steeping tea leaves in cool or sun-warmed water, the authentic sweet teas of the South are made by brewing black tea in boiling water. The recipe for blackberry iced tea uses pinch of baking soda to preserve the vibrant colors of the berries in the tea.
Southern sweet tea
Makes 1 gallon
12 bags black tea
6 cups boiling water, plus additional cold water
1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar
Ice
Lemon wedges or fresh mint sprigs (optional)
Place the tea bags in a large heat-proof 1-gallon pitcher. Add the boiling water and steep for 5 minutes. Spoon out the tea bags and squeeze them into the tea, then discard the tea bags. Stir in 1 cup sugar. Add enough cold water to fill the pitcher. Taste and adjust with remaining sugar as desired.
To serve, pour into ice-filled glasses, then garnish with lemon wedges or fresh mint.
Recipe adapted from Southern Living magazine
Blackberry tea
3 cups fresh or frozen blackberries (if frozen, thaw before using), plus additional fresh as garnish
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint, plus additional sprigs as garnish
Pinch of baking soda
6 bags black tea
4 cups boiling water
2 1/2 cups cold water
Ice
In a large pitcher, combine the blackberries and sugar. Use a wooden spoon to crush the berries and mix them with the sugar. Add the chopped mint and baking soda. Set aside.
Place the tea in a large heat-proof measuring cup. Add the boiling water and steep for 3 minutes. Spoon out the tea bags and squeeze them into the tea, then discard the tea bags.
Pour the tea into the blackberry mixture. Let stand at room temperature 1 hour. Pour the tea through a mesh strainer and discard solids. Return the tea to the pitcher.
Add cold water and stir well to dissolve sugar. Cover and chill until ready to serve.
To serve, pour into glasses filled with ice. Garnish with fresh mint and fresh blackberries on short wooden skewers. Makes about 7 1/2 cups.
Recipe adapted from ‘Southern Living’ magazine.
Agreed. My recipe is:
5 teabags per 2 liters of water, with a cup and 1/2 sugar.
Put the Sugar and Teabags into the pitcher, boil the water, and pour it in. Stir. Cover the top of the pitcher with a napkin or paper towel and a rubber band, and allow to steep for about 20 minutes.
Remove the teabags, and squeeze em out into the pitcher. Then refrigerate until nice and cold.
I’ll put my sweet tea up against anyone’s. This is a family recipie that’s generations old. I’ve never had any problem using teabags, just be sure not to break em, or it won’t turn out right.
Yep, Texas is a whole ‘nother country. East Texas is very Southern, which is why you find sweat tea everywhere. West Texas is very South Western. North Texas where I live is very metropolitan.
The other thing some ‘people’ put in cornbread that I can stand is wheat flour. Why?!
“Take 2 boxes on Jiffy mix but add 1/2 cup of sugar and tablespoon of vanilla and a smidgen of extra milk. Cook in cast iron skillet as dirtected with butter wedges on top.”
That sounds like pure heaven. I’m gonna have to try it....
Marie Callenders corn bread......YUMMY
McDonalds started offering it here in FL a few months ago. I tried it and it was pretty good. I was surprised.
Sounds like some cornbread I had once in Kentucky. It was more like a cake. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t cornbread, either.
I also miss hush puppies... :(
Must be a Texas thang.
They used to make fun of me for adding sugar to mine. :-)
My mom grew up in the Midwest but picked up the sweet tea thing. She made it even more concentrated, which she called “syrup” and kept in a jar in the fridge. We’d pour some in a glass and fill with water and ice. Tasted great in the summer with fried green tomato sandwiches!
I had fun explaining that ‘making tea in the driveway’ means that the driveway gets the best sunlight...to brew the tea.
1) a glass bottle of ice water in the fridge;
2) iced tea on hot summer days (mint in it if available);
3) fried chicken, mashed potatoes, chicken gravy, green beans, sliced homegrown tomatoes with Vidalia onions sliced on top and a sweetened vinaigrette;
4) porch swings and the baseball game softly on the radio;
5) swimming in the lake and falling out of a tire swing into it;
6) hide and seek after dark
7) snowcones and tilt-a-whirls (not necessarily at the same time)
8) old-school street lights coming on and the sound of the metal wheels of the paper boy’s cart on the sidewalk and hearing “Pa—per! Getchur evening pa—per,” as I’d fall asleep
9) playing Three Shades of a Ghost or Twenty Questions sitting on the porch swing
10) my father playing the guitar and singing “Five Foot Two” or “The Sheik of Ara-bi” and laughter at the parodies he’d do of “The Sheik”
11) Special “Hot Cross Buns” for Lent
12) Church on Sunday mornings — dressed in our best with white gloves and a bonnet, to boot
13) washing the dirt out of the creases in the bathtub at night and that feeling when you step out of the tub — scalded and clean
14) no shoes at no time (except Sundays) during the summer and not having the stones hurt your feet when you walked
15) being gone on my bicycle from breakfast to sundown all summer long
16) okay, so maybe a Hostess Cupcake, but homemade chocolate chip cookies or hot cherry pie was so much better. How 'bout yours?
Concur
That’s it!!! I forgot the cucumbers! It must be a Missouri thing. Oh, my gosh. So yummy!
I stopped putting sugar in my tea back when I was a teenager in the seventies. Unfortunately about 2000 restaurants in South Texas started serving both unsweetened and sweetened tea. It may have been about the time the tea companies started supplying restaurtants with tea making machines and dispensers with their logos. Perhaps it's cheaper to make a big batch of sweetened tea than to put packets of sugar on each table and let each customer decide how much sugar to add. I find that presweetened tea has much more sugar than I ever used to put in. It's really complicated ordering tea, because sometimes waiters only hear "sweet" and not "unsweet". I not only can't stand to drink tea that sweet, but I also worry that the sweetener might be high fructose corn rather than sucrose from cane sugar.
Real cornbread, Tarheel in exile recipe:
Put 8 inch iron skillet in oven at 425 deg for ten minutes.
Mix 1 cup each white and yellow cornmeal, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 Tbsp sugar, 1/4 tsp kosher salt. Stir in 1 cup buttermilk, 2 eggs.
Remove hot pan from oven, drop in 2 Tbsp butter, pour excess melted butter into batter and stir in. Pour batter into pan (edges should rise and start cooking immediately) and bake for 20 minutes.
Now if my great-granddaddy was still alive, and I had his own corn that he grew and took to the stone mill to be ground in small batches...but I have to make do with King Arthur.
My Yankee exile has destroyed any innate taste I might have had for sweet tea - you could put that stuff in a hummingbird feeder or use it for a glucose tolerance test.
Mrs VS
What? No fried ocra?
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