The House Wine of the South

Having mentioned yesterday that we will be including local recipes in this blog, I should get out of the way one particular recipe that is a southern institution, but a serious health threat to the unsuspecting. Sweet tea.

Yesterday, I made my first pitcher of this year-round beverage. It was a brief marriage that ended badly. Upon drinking a glass, I believe I nearly went into some sort of insulin shock, though the root of the problem probably lies closer in the near-toxic combination of sugar and really strong black tea. All I know is that, for a few minutes, I felt quite yucky.

Here’s the best way to describe sweet tea. Think of your typical pitcher of iced tea: the kind they serve in Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont, etc. Then imagine a gigantic vessel of some sort: say a giant pail typically used to dispense swill to barnyard animals - or one of those earthenware vases balanced on the heads of young Indian women for the purpose of transporting sizeable quantities of water from the River Ganges - or a wading pool. Now imagine this vessel filled to the brim with sugar, dumped into your pitcher of iced tea, and stirred about for a few seconds. Voila. You have sweet tea.

I exaggerate a little, but most contemporary recipes I have found for the stuff give a proportion of sugar to water that is roughly 1 - 1 1/2 cups to a pitcher. That’s a lot of sugar.

The history of sweet tea reveals a bit more restraint. The first documented recipe for sweet tea comes from Housekeeping in Old Virginia, a collection of 1700 recipes from 250 Virginia families compiled in 1878 by Marion Cabell Tyree, the granddaughter of Patrick Henry. (Actually, the full title is Housekeeping in Old Virginia, Containing Contributions from Two Hundred and Fifty Ladies in Virginia and her Sister States, Distinguished for Their Skill in the Culinary Art, and Other Branches of Domestic Economy. For brevity’s sake, HOV will do).

The recipe, from page 66, reads as follows:

Iced Tea. 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.

Two teaspoons of sugar in each goblet. Sounds reasonable, depending on the size of the goblet. An interesting note, beyond the fact the tea apparently took all day to make and that it was made with green tea instead of black (black tea really only took root in America during World War II, when Indian black tea had a greater availability than Far Eastern green tea), is that it is called "Iced Tea".

Iced Tea gained nationwide popularity during the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, when the extreme summer heat led one ingenious pavilion manager to "ice" the free cups of hot tea he was offering. The subsequent split between Southern Sweet Tea and Northern "unsweet" Iced Tea is much noted, but difficult to pin down in its history, a result perhaps of traditional cultural factors that made heavily sweetened tea in the South a cheaper and more socially acceptable alternative to morally lax beverages such as wine and stronger spirits.

And that is sweet tea. A drink that is certainly a matter of taste.

What? No recipe, you say? I refer you to the excellent Mrs. Tyree and her two teaspoonfuls of sugar. Anything more contemporary, and my conscience would be troubled with the prospect of some poor person stumbling upon it, and actually making it. That would never do.

Oh, and finally, I refer you to Michigan State University's online library called Feeding America, which contains dozens of early American cookbooks in PDF format, including Tyree's Housewives of Virginia. It is a very interesting collection.