Sweet Tea

I stumbled upon this southern style sweet tea recipe this morning and it caught me up short. "Like, huh? Someone would need a recipe for sweet tea?" It's so much a part of our family culture, it just never occured to me that there would be a need to write down instructions for it.

When the boys come home from their school year in Omaha, they down gallons of iced tea. They can't get enough of it. I fear they miss the sweet tea more than they miss their mother.

"So, what," I ask, "do you drink in Omaha?" Those of us at home are truly mystified. "Water," they say, "and milk."

Well, yeah, but what do you drink?

They shrug, at a loss for words, wince at the memory of their deprivation, and pour themselves some more sweet tea.

I love, love, love coffee, but I take iced tea for granted. Not having it in the fridge would feel to me like not having a doorknob on the front door. If it's not there, something is obviously wrong. Someone had better get on the ball.

The children take pride in trying out new combinations of tea bags when it's their turn to brew a pitcher. The Celestial Seasonings fruit teas mix well with the black teas (as I mentioned in passing the other day), and everyone likes mint, of course. Chamomile, however, just doesn't taste right iced, and most of us don't care for the cinnamon teas iced, either.

Since we have so many Littles who don't need the caffeine, we brew our tea with decaf tea bags -- generally the cheapest ones, since we go through so many, but I think Luzianne is actually the best tasting of the cheaper American brands. We use three family-size tea bags per gallon, or five to six small bags. We boil in the kettle and steep in the pitcher (filling to about 1/4 - 1/3 of the gallon), then add the sugar in at the same time as the teabags, so it dissolves well. Of course, it wouldn't be sweet tea without an appropriate amount of sugar: I use a cup per gallon -- the kids generally add more, as you might guess. We let it steep in the covered pitcher for about ten minutes, then remove the teabags, stir the sugar and add cold water to fill. The above linked recipe suggests using lemon extract, and I'm sure that's probably good, but why not use real lemon? And a handful of mint from the garden thrown in to steep is good, too.

And, there you go. Ready for the day, come summer or winter, hail or high water. Gotta have our sweet tea.

I'm curious, though. Is the sweet tea custom really just a Southern phenomenon? I grew up in the southeast, and inherited it from my southern family, but how about everyone else? Do Pacific coast and midwestern neighbors cool off with it? How about folks in the northeast? Do they ever serve iced tea in Australia or England, friends across the Atlantic?