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Drink

Iced Tea

A chilled beverage made from brewed tea, sugar, ice, and optional 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. Prepare the tea in the morning, making it stronger than usual.

  2. Strain the tea into a glass jar or pitcher and cover well.

  3. Set the jar or pitcher in a cold place until needed.

Serve

  1. Serve in glasses with broken ice and sugar.

  2. Add a few slices of lemon and a little lemon juice if 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 main flavour and colour; a stronger brew stays bold once poured over ice.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tea's bitterness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the tea.

The step that matters

Cover the tea and keep it cold. Tea left at room temperature can spoil and turn cloudy as it cools. Covering it keeps dust and odours out, and chilling it keeps the drink fresh until serving.

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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