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Drink

Iced Tea

A chilled tea brewed with cold water, steeped, strained, and served over cracked ice with optional sugar and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Iced Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Combine the tea and cold water in an earthenware or granite dish.

  2. Cover and let it steep for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

Serve

  1. Fill glasses with cracked ice and pour in the tea.

  2. Allow each person to add sugar and lemon as 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).

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

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

Tea
Provides the flavour and aroma of the drink as it steeps in cold water.
Cold water
Extracts flavour from the tea slowly, without the bitterness hot water can draw out.

The step that matters

Steeping the tea. Steeping for too short a time gives weak flavour, while steeping too long can make the tea taste bitter and astringent. Cold water extracts more slowly, so the timed steep matters.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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