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Drink

Tea

A hot beverage made by steeping loose tea in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and milk work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 738 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pot

  1. Ensure the teapot is clean.

  2. Pour boiling water into the teapot and let it sit for 5 minutes to heat.

  3. Discard the heating water and drain the teapot.

Brew and serve

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of tea for each cup of boiling water, or 2 teaspoons for stronger tea.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the tea in the pot.

  3. Let the tea steep for 5 minutes without boiling.

  4. Add more boiling water as needed, allowing ½ cup more for each additional person.

  5. Serve immediately, adding cold milk or cream and sugar 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. Tea + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Loose tea
Provides the flavour and colour of the drink as it steeps in the hot water.
Boiling water
Extracts compounds from the tea leaves, and its amount sets the strength and volume.

The step that matters

Let the tea steep for 5 minutes without boiling. Steeping time controls how much flavour and tannin leave the leaves. Water that is kept just below boiling extracts a cleaner flavour, while longer or hotter steeping makes the tea bitter and astringent.

“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.

More tea recipes

Beef 396Cakes 209Cake 116Iced 65Biscuits 60Flaxseed 44 See all 86 →

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