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Drink

Russian Tea

A chilled tea brewed with loose tea, sugar, lemon, and ice.

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

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 ↓

Russian Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Scald a teapot with boiling water.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of tea to the teapot.

  3. Pour ¼ cup of boiling water over the tea to cleanse it.

  4. Add 1 cup of boiling water to the teapot and let it steep for 4-5 minutes.

  5. Strain the tea and allow it to cool.

Serve

  1. In a glass, add 2 teaspoons of sugar and fill it halfway with broken ice.

  2. Add a slice of lemon and fill the glass with the cooled tea.

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. 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

Loose tea
Provides the main tea flavour and the astringent bitterness that the sugar and lemon balance.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that softens the tea's tannic bitterness.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the tea and cuts its sweetness.

The step that matters

Steep the tea for 4-5 minutes. Steeping too briefly leaves the tea weak, while steeping too long draws out excess tannins, making it harshly bitter. Timing controls the strength of the brew.

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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