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.
I confess that I have switched to Equal instead of using sugar, to cut back on the calories. I'll sometimes drink two pitchers a day, and the sugar is just too much...
Lemon is OK, so is mint. But I'll skip the unsweet tea. BTW, Equal does a better job than sugar in sweeting iced tea in the glass.
Oh, butterbeans were the worst to pick. With peas, you could just walk down the rows and pick by the handful. With butterbeans, you practically have to roll around in the dirt, because they're so close to the ground.
On second thought, okra was the worst to gather, because it itched.
I didn't know she was southern!
She was raised in land-locked Utah and ran a boarding house. She was the best cook in Utah county! I have recently aquired the pitcher she used and I will make sweet tea today (It's 5 degrees outside).Is Lipton's OK?
Comfort food.
You didn't use poles?
He always planted a HUGE garden, and as the boy in the family, I was expected to do my part. (My sister's chores were inside the house. She thought I was lucky. In retrospect, we were both lucky.) I'd get stationed at one end of a row with a large bucket and be told to get started. There were many rows, and they went on and on and on...
My grandfather planted corn and beans together so the beans would grow up the corn stalks.
It was that type of can. It was rich stuff. i never tasted anything like it since. It was SO good.
I've enjoyed this thread so much. It brings back fond memories. My grandmother, raised in the rural South during the depression, was fanatic about canning and freezing vegetables. My wife does it now, but it's not because she HAS to like the fine women from my family did.
Of course, our backyard garden is really just some tomato plants, cucumbers, okra, and maybe a few beans. It certainly can't rival the scope of the gardens of my boyhood.
My grandmother also made Tomato Gravy. Which was home canned tomatoes mixed with a little bacon grease and water and salt and pepper and simmered in an iron skillet. Served over biscuits. My wife makes in now with her home canned tomatos, and it is a huge hit. It must be a Mississippi thing, because other Southerners I've met have never heard of it. It was a breakfast staple during my childhood.
You have got to try it. It can be made with storebought tomatoes, but home canned is much better. The biscuits must be made from scratch, but you don't seem to be a wop-biscuit kind of lady anyway.
Agree entirely. This new corn is so sweet I might as well eat a sugar cube. My husband tells me I am just hopelessly old fashioned liking Silver Queen. He had me thinking that I was the only one who remembers and likes it.
Yes. Apparently it is so. I reluctantly stopped making it years ago.
Thanks and Stay safe !
The only thing that'll rile southerners more than ice tea is BBQ.
Hahahaha. Prove it.
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