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Tea, with Liqueur

A brewed tea mixed with lemon rind, lemon juice, sugar, and liqueur, served chilled with ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and green tea share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Tea, with Liqueur

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Make a sufficient quantity of good tea.

  2. Mix a little green tea with black tea.

  3. Strain the hot tea into a jug.

Flavour and serve

  1. Add the rind and juice of a lemon and 1 ounce of loaf sugar for each quart of tea.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Once cooled, add 1-2 glasses of any liqueur.

  4. Serve with a little ice.

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 + green teatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

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

  2. Green tea + black teatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

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

  3. Tea + black teatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together26 recipes

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

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

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

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

Black tea
Provides the main tannin-rich body and astringent backbone of the drink.
Green tea
Adds a lighter, more delicate character to blend with the black tea.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tea's bitterness and the lemon's acidity.
Lemon
Its rind and juice add aroma and acidity that brighten the tea.
Liqueur
Adds alcohol, sweetness and aromatic flavour to the tea.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the liqueur. Alcohol is volatile and its aromas evaporate when heated, so adding the liqueur to hot tea wastes much of its flavour and can make the drink taste harsh.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, green tea, 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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