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Drink

How to Make Tea

A method for preparing green and black tea using boiling and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Green tea and black tea share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

How to Make Tea

six servings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the green tea

  1. Scald the teapot for six servings.

  2. Add 3 teaspoons of green tea. Pour a little boiling water over it. Let it steep.

Make the black tea

  1. Add 4 teaspoons of black tea to a covered tin cup. Pour cold water over it.

  2. Bring the black tea to a quick boil. Let it boil for 1 minute.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the boiled black tea with the steeped green tea, ensuring the green tea does not boil.

  2. Fill up with the necessary amount of boiling water. Serve.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green tea
Provides the delicate, grassy aroma and flavour base of the blend.
Black tea
Adds a stronger, malty body and depth that balances the green tea.

The step that matters

Keep the green tea from boiling. Boiling green tea extracts bitter tannins and makes it taste harsh and astringent, so it should only be steeped in hot water, not boiled.

“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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