Posted on 01/30/2002 10:41:25 AM PST by aomagrat
Sweet tea, as one of the characters in the movie ''Steel Magnolias'' noted, is the house wine of the South.
It is what we drank when we cooled our houses with attic fans. As a teen-age hay hauler, I'd drink a jug a day.
When I sit around telling stories, that's what I drink, winter or summer.
I am the uncaped crusader for the preservation of the tradition, which is in trouble. Young people don't know how to make tea, and bottled liquid they call tea is sprouting like kudzu in stores.
Here is my tea pedigree:
I have consumed sweet tea at Mrs. Wilkes Boarding House in Savannah, Ga., and at Crooks Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C., where you sweeten your tea with a concoction of mint and sugar water. I have drunk sweet tea with George Wallace.
My sweet-tea crusade developed in a roundabout way in 1993 after I spent a day picking Silver Queen corn in south Alabama. I, sweaty and dirty, went to a catfish joint and ordered a glass of tea to go. The cashier brought a full pitcher and set me in a rocking chair on the porch. I felt obliged to drink the entire pitcher.
I wrote about that woman's kind heart and proposed that sweet tea is much more than a drink. It's the memories of our grandmothers and Sunday lunch. It's a symbol of our hospitality. I invited readers to share a sweet tea memory. Readers rhapsodized.
We learned the importance of tea. My bosses at the Mobile, Ala., newspaper allowed me to sponsor a contest in which a panel selected the best sweet tea. The New York Times published a story about my crusade, which was followed by a story in Saveur, a fancy New York magazine. Then, Southern Living published a small story in which the writer proclaimed me a ``sweet-tea evangelist.''
In 1999, I took the crusade to Oklahoma. The battle there has been lost. To put Oklahomans in perspective, one day I was in a cafe in Hobart. After determining that sweet tea wasn't on the menu, I was happy to find that pinto beans were.
''You have any rice to put under those beans?'' I asked the waitress. She looked at me like I'd ordered a scoop of topsoil.
I have learned that the sugar you use matters. (You can't beat Dixie Crystals.) I use tea from a company in Mobile, which perfected a blend that is as clear after a night in the refrigerator as it is the moment you make it.
We used to go across the bay to Hampton Roads to my Aunt Evelyn's house for Sunday lunch. Fried chicken, turnip or mustard greens, fresh green beans or purple hulled peas (I hated having to hull peas...ended up with fingers stained for days), mashed taters, a couple loaves of Wonder Bread (was there any other bread?), butter...and gallon upon gallon of sweet tea.
Or coming back from hunting rabbits with my uncle Milton. The grownups would have beer, and I'd get sweet tea. Those were good days...very good days.
We knew some people that made and sold it, but the state voted to become wet that little industry faided away.
What????????? Next thing you know, you'll
be putting kidney beans in con carne and
having the cahones to call it chili! No rice,
please, we're TexMex.
If they wanted something else to drink, they had to make the effort...which they did.
I'm back in my native country of Texas now.
LOL! I don't remember that line. Now I'll just HAVE to watch the movie again!
We ALWAYS had sweet iced tea when I was growing up, but I never realized just HOW sweet it was until my Momma came up for a visit once. I had always made tea, but one night she made it and my kids started asking for Mimi's iced tea. Turns out she used TWICE the amount of sugar I did. No wonder they liked it!
I make a pitcher of iced tea just about every night. My only concession to health is that I now use Lipton Decaf tea bags. I began doing that when I realized my kids were having trouble getting to sleep and began to think it might be the caffeine. And I've begun to use fructose instead of regular sugar. It is a little sweeter than the dextrose so I don't have to use as much.
But I NEVER use lemon in mine; I've just never liked it. I'll have to try some mint in it sometime though. I like chamomile tea with mint on winter evenings.
One thing I will never get used to is having to tell the waitress to leave the grits off my plate (and getting strange looks for it). Still a little too much Hoosier left in me, I guess.
What'd you go and do that for? If it don't have grits, it ain't breakfast. :-)
I had a friend who drove a strange route to work while pregnant so she could avoid all the fast food restaurants. The smell got to her.
Congrats and good luck.
You trying to start trouble? Hehehe. Actually I don't think so. Texans as a rule don't drink sweet tea in my experience and they are always the ones who start the barbeque fights; however, don't be surprised if it attracts the barbeque conoisseurs and snobs. After all, nothing goes with barbeque better than sweet tea.
Hehehe.
One of my best sweet tea stories actually took place in Colorado. Sweet tea was one of the few things of the south I managed to preserve in our house when I was living out there. When my daughter was in her early teens she had some friends over for the superbowl and I was making them a snack. I made home made fries and sweet tea. Those poor, deprived kids raved over it and couldn't get enough. They started asking for it whenever they came over. It gave me hope for the non-south.
OMG that sounds SO good!
Ain't that the truth? *Sigh.* Nothing like it.
Who, me?
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