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Drink

To Make a Cup of Tea

A method for preparing a single cup of tea using loose tea leaves and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

To Make a Cup of Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the water briskly but not for too long.

  2. Scald the teapot.

Steep and serve

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of tea for each person, plus 1 for the pot.

  2. Pour just enough water to steep the tea thoroughly, keeping the teapot no more than half full.

  3. Boil more fresh water and fill the pot as needed.

  4. Serve with a slice of lemon 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Loose tea
Provides the main flavour and aroma as its compounds dissolve into the hot water.
Water
Extracts flavour from the tea leaves and forms the drink's body.

The step that matters

Pour just enough water to steep the tea thoroughly, keeping the teapot no more than half full.. Tea leaves need room to unfurl and release flavour evenly. Too much water in the pot can over-steep the leaves and make the brew bitter, while too little leaves it weak.

“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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