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Drink

Ice Tea

A chilled beverage made by brewing strong tea, cooling it, and serving over ice with optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Ice Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Brew and chill

  1. Brew strong tea and pour it into a pitcher.

  2. Refrigerate the tea for several hours until cold.

Serve

  1. Serve the tea over ice in glasses.

  2. Add a slice of lemon to each glass if desired.

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 + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Strong tea
Provides the main flavour and a slightly astringent bite that holds up to dilution.
Ice
Chills the tea quickly and slightly dilutes it as it melts.

The step that matters

Brew the tea strong. The ice melts into the tea as it is served, diluting it. A weak brew will taste watery, so the tea should be brewed stronger than you would drink it plain.

“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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