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Drink

Russian Tea

Tea served hot or iced, flavored with lemon slices, sugar, and preserved fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Russian Tea

Why it works: Lemon and tea 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 ↓

Russian Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the hot tea

  1. For hot tea, remove seeds from lemon slices and place one in each cup.

  2. Pour hot tea over the lemon and sweeten to taste.

Prepare the cold tea

  1. For cold tea, add lemon juice to iced tea.

  2. Place a slice of lemon in each glass.

Garnish and serve

  1. Add a preserved strawberry or a candied cherry to each cup or glass.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemon
Adds bright acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the tea.
Tea
Provides the main flavour and body of the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that softens the tea's bitterness and acidity.

Swap the lemon

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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