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Drink

Iced Tea

A chilled beverage made by steeping black tea, cooling, and serving over ice with lemon and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Iced Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Brew

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of black tea and 3 extra teaspoons to a teapot.

  2. Pour boiling water over the tea and let it steep for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain the tea into a pitcher and allow it to cool slowly.

Chill and serve

  1. Once cool, place the pitcher on ice until ready to serve.

  2. Pour the tea into goblets over ice and serve with lemon quarters.

  3. Sweeten to taste.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Black tea + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41 recipes

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

  3. Black tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together113 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Black tea
Provides the main flavor and the tannins that give the iced tea its body and slight bite.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the tea's natural astringency.

The step that matters

Let the tea cool slowly before chilling. Cooling the tea gradually keeps it clear; chilling hot tea quickly can cause cloudiness as tea compounds precipitate.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (black tea, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against black 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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