~ Chinese proverb
From a recent comment thread on Deus Ex Malcontent:
Emily... Oh, and an urban myth down here in Texas is that in restaurants up north they don’t put ice in their tea. I know this is dumb to ask, but is this true? Please don’t laugh, I really want to know if this is a common practice.
Jayne... As in iced tea? Because if you just ask for tea you will get hot tea ... But yes, darlin', we use ice. Not sure where that one came from. But if you do order our iced tea, it's not likely to be sweetened. You have to do that yourself with the little packets on the table, and it will never be as sweet as you are used to.
Anonymous... @emily: We do put ice ICED tea, but not in hot tea. Do you not drink hot tea at all in the South?
Emily... No, I do not drink hot tea. I have some friends that are a little bit more “artsy” that drink hot tea, so I know it is available to the public, but I don’t do it. Hot tea is gross and taste like hot nasty. Sorry if I offended all of the hot tea drinkers out there, but that is how it goes. Oh, and this little conspiracy theory all started at a baseball game, and it went a little something like this:
-“NO, you’ve got to be kidding me?
What do you just have to carry around a bag of ice or something?”
-“Yeah, that’s what I heard, you get it hot.”
-“Hot tea, that’s crazy, why don’t they put ice in it to make it cold?”
-“Crazy northerners.”
Besides bringing a little chuckle to my morning, this conversation did get me thinking about tea. (Pregnant women are highly susceptible to suggestion when it comes to food of any kind.) As a New Yorker, I am fortunate to have friends from many cultures and all corners of the world, and although living in such a mishmash comes with a tendency to no longer notice the differences, it can be fun to focus on them every now and then. While I grab a medium coffee with skim and two sugars from the pushcart man on 49th street every morning, my co-worker (born in China but raised in Baltimore) brews green tea leaves in a press at her desk. I do enjoy tea, but mine is usually the black variety, enjoyed in the afternoon with some milk and sugar, like my British friends from across the pond. Other friends are baffled as to how I can drink my tea with milk at all, preferring theirs with a squeeze of lemon, which would of course make the milk curdle.
As for our friends below the Mason-Dixon line, their affinity for "sweet tea" is one of those stereotypes that exists because it is true. The foodie in me can't understand how sweet tea could possibly pair well with any food enjoyed by anyone over the age of twelve. Concern for my dental health stops me even when my sweet tooth begs for some consideration. But my year living in Atlanta, working for several restaurateurs, forced me to, if not appreciate, at least accept the addiction that these Southerners are all afflicted with. And I eventually began to realize that on an afternoon in "Hot'lanta," a sweetened glass of iced tea is not half bad. I remember fondly my first few batches made in that loft overlooking the Southern city, with tea bags and boiling water and sugar and my own addition of fresh mint leaves. As it brewed on the counter, I smiled as I began to finally feel just a little bit assimilated into the strange new culture surrounding me. I haven't made sweet tea since moving back to New York four years ago; it wouldn't feel right in the hard-edged land of cynicism.
In my quest for some information on the passion for tea that so many cultures share, I came across some wonderful little quotes, blurbs, and links that I will share with you. Happy sipping, my loves.
"Sugar worship might account for much of sweet tea's popularity, but I think its appeal lies in the ice. Southerners seem to have a particular fascination with ice. This may stem, most obviously, from the fact that the Southern climate is often steamier than a Rat Pack schvitz."
~ Jeffrey Klineman, www.Slate.com: I Wish I Lived in a Land of Lipton
"When the news reporter said "Shopkeepers are opening their doors bringing out blankets and cups of tea" I just smiled. It's like yes. That's Britain for you. Tea solves everything. You're a bit cold? Tea. Your boyfriend has just left you? Tea. You've just been told you've got cancer? Tea. Coordinated terrorist attack on the transport network bringing the city to a grinding halt? Tea dammit! And if it's really serious, they may bring out the coffee. The Americans have their alert raised to red, we break out the coffee. That's for situations more serious than this of course. Like another England penalty shoot-out."
~ Jslayeruk, as posted on Metaquotes Livejournal, in response to the July 2005 London subway bombings
"Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors."
~Alice Walker
"American-style iced tea is the perfect drink for a hot, sunny day. It's never really caught on in the UK, probably because the last time we had a hot, sunny day was back in 1957."
~Tom Holt
"When, I look back on any given memory of my childhood in Florence, South Carolina ," she began, "my mother always seems to appear out of nowhere to refill all of our glasses with sweet iced tea. We drank it more than we drank water. This did not seem strange to me until I moved to New York. I ordered sweet tea in a restaurant and the waitress gave me a funny look and said, 'We don't have sweet tea. We have tea and we have sugar."
~ Erich Kuersten, www.Slashfood.com, Secret of the South: Sweet Tea
"It's rough. It's been rough on that food. It's different eating here than it is at the house. Ain't got no sweet tea, and ain't got no fried chicken."
~ Boo Weekley, PGA golfer from Milton, Fla., interviewed by the BBC
"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."
~ Henry Fielding
22 comments:
I have some friends that are a little bit more “artsy” that drink hot tea, so I know it is available to the public, but I don’t do it. Hot tea is gross and taste like hot nasty.
Aww, this made me LOL. I love Emily. The first time I ever drank hot green tea was in a Japanese student's dorm room sophomore year of college and I thought it was completely disgusting. Politeness made me choke it down. Now I go through boxes of organic green tea bags by the hundred -- sometimes plain and sometimes with a bit of good old Berks County locally collected honey. Oh, and of course, I can't forget another Berks County specialty: Turkey Hill iced tea. I go through a few gallons of the diet green (regular or mango) a week. Yeah, I ain't proud.
Your response cracked me up. I also like that drinking hot tea makes me artsy.
When my grandparents came to the US for the first time to visit my uncle and his American wife, they were offered iced tea (my aunt knew Iranians drink tea). They were mortified. My grandmother literally called my mom to ask what she could have done to deserve being served cold tea.
Hee-hee-hee! Cute post, Jayne! As a New York born and southern raised person, I've been exposed to it all. My best friend in Virginia never had a bagel with cream cheese until she met me and I certainly had never heard of fried baloney and peanut butter sandwiches until I met Gina - a true southerner. [I am brave and tried it and it wasn't that bad, though I've never wanted another!]
I will tell you this though - in Indonesia you can get hot tea, sure and even go to the tea plantation. But iced sweet tea is very popular too. When we moved to Atlanta, Remi felt right at home in that regard! I wonder if there are other places where sweet iced tea is common?
Fried baloney and peanut butter? But why? And how? It sounds like something kids would come up with for a Mother's Day lunch. I suddenly want to make this...
LS- Turkey Hill iced tea is a drink of the gods; you're right. although Chez for some reason prefers to take random trips to the Wawa on 422 whenever we're in town for their iced tea, which he insists is better. In jr. high, we had Clover Hill farms iced tea in the vending machines, and I was once (and only once) called into the principal's office for pouring a carton of it over a boy's head on the bus.
K- fried baloney and PB sounds disgusting and I totally want one right now. can you give us the details of this delicacy??
P- mental note not to serve and Iranian iced tea has been made.
To girl with curious hair - be sure to toast the bread. That way the peanut butter melts and the fried baloney is the hot salty bit in between. Uh-oh. I sound like I've actually done this before. Honestly, it was a friend....
Wawa has a brand of tea that isn't just sweet, it's called, like, "ULTRA SWEET" or something like that -- and as such, it rules.
When I was a kid, my grandmother always used to watch how much sugar and/or Sweet & Low I dumped into my tea and comment that I was going to get "worms."
To this day, I have no idea if you can really get worms from drinking overly sweetened iced tea.
Wawa iced tea?? Wawa does a lot of things right, but iced tea is not one of those things. And their green tea takes like it was brewed with grass from someone's backyard, only more artificial-ish.
Ooh, also -- I don't know how long it's been since you visited, but Turkey Hill now has diet pomegranate white tea and iced chai. Awesome-slawsome!
Born and raised in the South, I know a few things about sweet tea:
Set the bags in a pitcher of water, let sit outside in a sunny spot for two hours, and you have sun-sweetened sweet tea--no need for sugar.
Don't ever drink sweet tea and eat dairy products--specifically ice cream--because it gives you kidney stones. (Perhaps that is the reference to the 'worms' warning, Chez?)
Also: do try banana-mayonaise sandwiches. Think of it like a fruit salad with mayo--tangy, sweet, and delicious. I was raised on 'em.
And as lifelong Southerner, I do not drink sweet tea. I drink hot green tea, or iced herbal tea at the most.
:) I love this post Jayne! Me and food, I swear...
i was in atlanta for 8 years and could never quite like sweet tea. it wasn't bad in an arnold palmer, though - 1/2 sweet tea, 1/2 lemonade. the tartness of the lemonade tempered the sweet tea some.
i have happy childhood memories of drinking lipton ice tea (the jarred, powdered mix) and eating mom's cold tuna salad for lunch during summer. while i've certainly moved beyond the lipton tea in terms of taste, no other tea tastes quite right with that salad. :)
like my mother and her mother before her, i am a hot tea drinker. i used to drink a lot of coffee but i started getting more sensitive to it. i avoided all caffeine while pregnant, and it seems the little one is sensitive to it as well - whenever i have some now, HE stays up all night. which means i need more caffeine in the morning... vicious cycle, that one. so i'm off the juice completely. i don't mind drinking decaf tea, it's the cherry cokes i miss the most. :(
Aww, Litely, I'm a Bucks County girl who was raised on Turkey Hill iced tea. WaWa iced tea runs a close second in terms of sugary goodness.
I lived in Gainesville, Florida for five years, and it took a while, but I eventually grew to love sweet tea. I couldn't quite stomach it the way the life-long Gainesvillians did, so I'd order it half-n-half (as in, half sweet, half unsweet tea). Oh, that's the other thing - there's no such thing as unsweetened iced tea down there - it's UNSWEET. I actually had friends who would add more sugar to theirs when we'd go out for barbecue. These same people would also add sugar to their already sweetened Kool-Aid. Good gracious.
Hrm. As a life-long Memphian, I can attest to the ubiquitous but confounding appeal of iced, strongly sweetened tea around these parts. My entire family drinks it daily by the vat but I've always found it foul. It's phenomenally sugary and usually very weak - just a pale, beige, sweet water. But I can't say, though, that hot tea is thought of as strange or "artsy" around here, as in Emily's case.
The oddest thing is that the term "iced tea" only refers to the gross Southern variety. I could make iced green tea or iced barley tea but then everyone says, "I thought you hated iced tea." You can ice any kind of tea, bitches! Ugh.
So, I have drunk tea other than Lipton because I try to consider myself "out-going" when it comes to my food choices (rather than a dumb hick who only eats Vienne-Wienies(pronounced Veeeeny-Weeenys) and Summer Sausage). For example today's dinner was a seaweed and squid salad. I have tried green tea, and I even own some Green Apple tea which is delicious. The thing is though, I make it in the morning and put it in the freezer, that way I can stand to drink it for lunch. I honestly believe- wait I know with a hundred percent certainty that most of my family has never had hot tea.
The nicest thing to do for ladies at work is when you go to lunch bring back some Bush's Chicken sweet tea. These babies cost 75cents and hold enough water to fill a balloon- a large balloon. Some of the ladies at work like it with sweet tea and lemonade.
Also to Kolby, yeah, there is no such thing as unsweetened iced tea. We just say "tea" and nothing else. I personally like unsweetened tea with a bit of sweet-n-low- because when you add sweet-n-low to sweetened tea you look like a jackass.
Oh, dear God, YES. Wawa Extra Sweet Tea is FABULOUS. It's not as good as Chik Fil A's sweet tea and it's not fit to fill a prison toilet in the south, but for a cheap fix of entirely too sweet tea, it's great.
I was at a friend's daughter's birthday party recently and it was an unseasonably 90 degrees in the Pacific NW. We were sitting outside and I was offered either lemonade or iced tea. Now around these parts iced tea always comes unsweetened, and not only was that what I was expecting, but also wanting because I prefer to save my post-baby calories for food rather than non-alcoholic drinks. I was brought a lukewarm paper cup filled with pre-sweetened "iced" tea, but with no ice. So there you go, northerners serving iced tea without ice. It was disgusting, but I choked it down to be polite.
Jayne, as a lifelong Alabamian who has had his fair share of many different teas (and even developed a taste for a little hot tea every now and again), might I suggest you find a Southerner who would be willing to ship you a gallon of Milo's Sweet Tea or even better, for those who watch our waists, a gallon of Milo's Splenda Sweet Tea. Swear to God, you can't tell the difference. In fact, I kinda just drank a half gallon of it this evenin'...
I'd be happy to ship it to ya. Hell, I'd even throw in a Sun-Drop, which if any of you know, is Alabama's soda equivalent of crack cocaine.
All I have to say is that Icy Tea causes kidney stones. I'm serious. When I was at my urologist he asked me what I drank most of, my reply "Diet iced tea" he asked what brand and when I replied with Icy Tea he said, "Oh, that's the worst."
I love sweet tea, hot tea, and even unsweetened iced tea. What's that make me?
I recently moved from New Hampshire to Kentucky. When I asked for hot tea at a local restaurant, the waitress looked at me like I had two heads and was convinced that such a thing didn't even exist.
On a somewhat related note, my husband has noticed that when he orders coffee down here, they don't bring cream unless he asks for it. Do most Southerners drink coffee black or is it just a Kentucky thing?
What's interesting about Atlanta is that ITP, (inside the perimeter as opposed to the suburbs), ordering hot tea is just as common as ordering sweet tea. There's a new breed of southerners that hold fast to their traditions, but are becoming more open to new experiences as the region's population and diversity grow drastically. Thank god. We need some new genes in this pool :)
Hello -
I am a filmmaker in Atlanta. I read your latest blog with the mention of Edna Lewis and her recipes.
I just wanted to let you know I produced a 21 minute documentary about Miss Edna Lewis and its viewable in its entirety on Internet at a Gourmet Magazine website:
http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/01/Edna
and at a Georgia Public Broadcasting website:
http://www.cforty7.com/film/theater?film_test=16
My documentary is called Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie.
My website, http://bbarash.com/bb_friedchicken.htm has more information about the film and the story of Miss Lewis.
Sincerely,
Bailey Barash
Go to 91st and 1st, the restaurant is called Sigiri, it's Sri Lankan. Try the tea, renounce all others, it's that simple... Oh and the food is beyond awesome. Here's the map...
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Sigiri+Sri+Lanka+Restaurant&near=New+York,+NY&cd=1
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