As a child I remember my mom brewing tea on the stove. She would have me help her open each of the little paper-wrapped tea bags and drop them into the simmering saucepan, carefully draping the little string with its torn paper tab. When it was sufficiently brewed (a decision mysterious to me) she would fish them out with tongs and squeeze them dry, and then measure in the sugar; stir and dissolve; then the precarious ritual with the funnel and the recycled milk jug and the steam. She poured it in hot and then topped it with tap water, letting parchment-colored seafoam spurt up like a science fair volcano and run down into the sink.
It was well known in my family that Mom’s cooking was meant to imitate my grandma—not her mom but my dad’s. Everything she did was to please him, to do it the way he knew and liked. Her method of making iced tea was one of the things she copied from her mother-in-law. We have maybe three or four canonical cakes in my family, each of which has the same pedigree, and a couple of load-bearing holiday dishes. The repetition of these things, the talk about them, the little idiosyncratic details of technique recapitulated in love, have perhaps done more to establish a sense of family identity than anything else. Once again, the storied five-flavor poundcake. Yes. ‘Again!’ we all say, as God (wrote Chesterton) says to the sun each morning, and every evening to the moon. Again, again.
The original recipe had 2 cups of sugar to the gallon, I believe. At some point Dad started to worry about his weight and Mom decided to adjust. She weaned us down to 1½ cups and then to 1¼. This is where we stopped. There was always sweet tea in the fridge, but the sweet part had a little asterisk next to it. This was not “grandma sweet.” But, we had to live with it. We would drive down to visit my dad’s parents every couple of weeks, and we could look forward to having the real stuff then. In this way we adapted ourselves to the degradation of our race. Grandpa had never been fat.
I was seven when she passed away. It was unexpected and sudden. The recreation of recipes then became more urgent, more tender. My mom spent several years fine-tuning her reconstruction of The Dressing—our own buttery, brownie-pan-baked rejoinder to the more northerly textures of Thanksgiving stuffing. But “grandma tea” essentially vanished from my life. Perhaps there were a handful of family occasions when someone brewed a gallon to the old standards. And there were and are, of course, commercial offerings, which tended to disappoint. Bojangles’ is heavily overbrewed. Grocery store varieties are almost always too acidic, or actually mixed with lemon, which misses the point. Some country restaurants I’ve come across sweeten their tea well beyond the purview of the godly. (Perhaps if I were looking for something to pour over my pancakes...) You wouldn’t think it would require any amount of forethought or doing for a man of the South to enjoy a proper glass of sweet tea, but this just shows how far we have fallen.
Coffee does more for me than tea, and in another way, tea does more than coffee. It depends on the task and the hour. You can look up the science on L-Theanine if you care about such things. At some point last year I was brewing myself three or four cups of hot earl grey to get through the workday. Then it occurred to me that if I had like a gallon of the stuff pre-brewed and chilled I could just gulp it down continuously—ancestral wisdom echoing down the corridors of time. The great American drink was invented just for this, I thought. So I started brewing iced tea.
I drink hot tea without any kind of sweetener, but when poured over ice this didn’t seem right to me. My impulse, being so much weaker even than my father (i.e. more captive to vanity, among other things), was to avoid calories entirely. So, I started experimenting with liquid stevia. The characteristic bitter notes of this now-famous African herb were perfectly matched to the earl grey, and I saw no downside. (I knew stevia to possess this power against lime but never with lemon, so I had to see.) After several inadequate batches I worked my way up to 2 tbsp to the gallon, which finally sounded that clear and superlative note still faintly remembered from earliest boyhood—grandma-sweet.
I must admit there’s still a tinge of falsity. Stevia tea does not “cure” in the same mysterious way that tea made with cane sugar will sweeten and deepen through the night. (So our petty foibles conspire to vouchsafe our disenchantment.) And there is the curious spectral tendency of the glycosides to flit and feint—one sip overstrong, the next barely sweet—as if to recollect to you your weakness, and the diminution of the age; the way you have sought to live by manipulation and device, by optimization and control; your sedentary and aimless acedia; your thwarted ambition; your conceited self-deception; your pinched and pusillanimous heart.