Sweet tea

A glass of sweet tea

Sweet tea is a form of iced tea in which sugar or some other form of sweetener is added to the hot water before brewing, while brewing the tea, or post-brewing, but before the beverage is chilled and served.

Origins

Sweet Tea is a staple beverage in the U.S. Southern states; most family-style and fast food restaurants in the region offer the customer a choice of sweet tea or unsweetened (sometimes referred to as "unsweet") iced tea. However, most Southerners prefer the sweet variant. Dolly Parton refers to sweet tea as the "table wine of the South."

How to make sweet tea

The amount of sweetener added to the beverage during the brewing process can be a bone of contention between the person responsible for preparing it and those who consume it; hence the witticism occasionally heard in the South: "Could I have a teabag for this glass of Karo syrup?" Despite this witticism, it should be noted that the most discriminating connoisseurs of this beverage use only cane sugar, and never corn syrup.

Iced tea is normally served unsweetened throughout the rest of the United States: a request for a glass of "sweet tea" in these regions will usually be met with a blank look. Displaced Southerners and others who want to sweeten their iced tea may need to dissolve sugar in the already cold tea themselves, a difficult proposition since sugar does not dissolve easily in cold water.

Artificial sweeteners such as Nutrasweet have been used in lower calorie variants of sweet tea for decades but have always lagged behind sugar, this is now changing in some restaurants where Splenda is being served as it tastes more like sugar than any artificial sweetener before it.

Serving and condiments

Sweet tea is commonly served in a tall tumbler or iced tea glass and an iced tea spoon or drinking straw. Sweet tea is frequently served with a slice of lemon and sometimes with fresh mint. When mixed with other ingredients such as fruit juice and ginger ale, it becomes tea punch.

History

The oldest known recipe for sweet ice tea was published in 1879 in a community cookbook called Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by Marion Cabell Tyree. This recipe calls for green tea. In fact, most sweet tea drunk during this period was green tea. However, during World War II, the major sources of green tea were cut off from the United States, leaving them with tea almost exclusively from British-controlled India which produces black tea. Americans came out of the war drinking nearly 99 percent black tea.

As an April Fool's day joke Georgia State Representatives, John Noel, and four co-sponsors, introduced House Bill 819:

• (a) As used in this Code section, the term 'sweet tea' means iced tea which is sweetened with sugar at the time that it is brewed.
• (b) Any food service establishment which served iced tea must serve sweet tea. Such an establishment may serve unsweetened tea but in such case must also serve sweet tea.
• (c) Any person who violates this Code section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature.

Sweet Tea Line

The sweet tea line is the boundary of the region in which "sweet tea" is generally served and accepted. To the North it is along the Ohio River border. It is somewhere West of the Mississippi River. South Florida is also excluded being that sweet tea is hard to find south of the Tampa-Orlando-Melbourne area.

See also

• Cuisine of the Southern United States
• United States Regional Cuisine
• Sweet Tea Queens

References

• An early recipe
• History of Iced Tea and Sweet Tea
• Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree. ISBN 1410105083 is a recent paperback edition.