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Green Tea—iced Tera

A chilled beverage made from brewed green tea, sugar, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Green tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 104 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Green Tea—iced Tera

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Scald the teapot.

  2. Add 1 quart of boiling water and 2 teaspoons of green tea to the teapot.

  3. If preparing for supper, do this in the morning.

  4. At dinner time, strain the tea through a tea strainer into a pitcher, without stirring.

  5. Let the tea sit until tea time.

Serve

  1. Pour the tea into decanters, leaving sediment behind.

  2. Fill goblets with ice.

  3. Add 2 teaspoons of granulated sugar to each goblet.

  4. Pour the tea over the ice and sugar.

  5. Add a squeeze of lemon for flavor.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Green tea + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green tea
Provides the main flavor and the slightly bitter, astringent character of the drink.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tea's bitterness.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness to the flavor of the tea.

The step that matters

Strain without stirring. Stirring or leaving the leaves in the tea too long releases more bitter tannins and fine particles, making the drink harsher and cloudier. Straining into the pitcher without stirring keeps the sediment behind.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (green tea, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Pineapplefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against green tea, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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