Skip to main content
Drink

Tea

A simple brewed tea made by steeping tea leaves in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brew

  1. Rinse an earthen teapot with boiling water and let it dry.

  2. Add the tea leaves to the pot.

  3. Pour boiling water over the tea leaves.

Steep

  1. Let the teapot sit at boiling point for 3 to 5 minutes.

  2. For soft water, use it immediately after boiling.

  3. For hard water, boil for 20 to 30 minutes before use.

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

What each ingredient does

Tea leaves
Release flavour and aroma compounds into the water during steeping, giving the tea its character.
Water
Extracts flavour from the leaves, and its hardness affects how the tea tastes.

The step that matters

Let the teapot sit at boiling point for 3 to 5 minutes.. Steeping time controls how much flavour and tannin the water pulls from the leaves. Steeping too long extracts more tannin, which makes the tea taste 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 →

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes