First iced tea
Who first had the bright idea of chucking some ice in a cup of tea and turning a decidedly hot beverage into a refreshing summer staple?
If you believe the popular story, the answer is an English tea merchant called Richard Blechynden, who supposedly invented iced tea at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, USA (also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition). He had set up shop in the East India Pavilion to promote the black teas of India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The weather was sweltering, nobody wanted his tea hot and business was looking decidedly tepid. So he added ice, served it cold and watched the crowds come running.
It’s a lovely story. A classic tale of necessity being the mother of invention. There’s just one small problem. Iced tea was already around long before Richard arrived in St. Louis. In fact, people had been writing about it for decades. There were even recipes in American cookbooks almost 30 years before the fair opened its gates.
So, if Blechynden didn’t invent iced tea, what exactly did he do? And how did a drink that once seemed an unusual way to serve tea become one of the world’s great warm-weather refreshments?
Time to put the kettle on. (Then leave it to cool).
The earliest written mention of iced tea is from 28th July 1823 (a Monday), where it was enjoyed in Naples, Italy, of all places. The term is used in the travel writings of an influential Irish writer and society figure called Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington. She became famous for many things, including her conversations with Lord Byron and for being the host of a London Salon that brought together leading artists, writers and politicians, where intellectual discourse (“conversation is the legs on which thought walks”) was paired with fashionable refreshments.
And like many other aristocratic ladies, she also went on a Grand Tour, where she spent months travelling around Europe, diarising her observations and experiences in vivid and daily detail. In The Idler in Italy (Volume 2) – published in 1839, 16 years after her trip – she mentions the importance of tea in the sweltering July heat of Naples.
"The heat is intense here, and we find no relief except in the ice-shops... Tea is brought in immediately, and the ice-shops are crowded by the beau monde...”
OK, so at this stage she’s not specifically mentioning the temperature of the tea, but the implication is it’s cold. Don’t worry, she gets more specific later, on the 28th July:
“We discovered last evening, that two of our Italian servants are no mean performers on the guitar, and sing well enough to be listened to with pleasure, by even more fastidious critics than we are. We made this discovery while sipping iced tea last night in the delicious pavilion at the end of the terrace.”
Bingo. The first written reference to iced tea. Of course, she doesn’t give us a recipe or explain it in any more detail, but it’s the start of our tea tale and implies that iced tea was a common enough refreshment in the Italian summer by this point. And who would have thought the origin story of this uniquely American tradition began in Naples?
By the mid-19th century, cold tea was starting to appear in other travel accounts too. In 1842, German writer, cartographer and geographer Johann Georg Kohl reported that “ice-tea” was being enjoyed in considerable quantities during the Russian summer. His book, Russian and the Russians, is a mine of fascinating facts.
"They are fond of cooling all their beverages with ice; indulge themselves freely in the frozen juices, which are sold all the summer in the streets of all their towns; and drink not only ice-water, ice-wine, ice-beer, but even ice-tea, throwing into a cup of tea a lump of ice instead of sugar."
This same anecdote is retold by none other than Charles Dickens on 16th August 1851 in Household Words, an English weekly literary magazine he wrote and edited.
But sometimes iced tea, that simplest of drinks, was somewhat more complicated to make. Take this recipe from The Kentucky Housewife, a famous Southern cookbook written by Mrs. Lettice Bryan and published in 1839 (includes more than 1,300 Kentucky recipes). She called one of them ‘Tea Punch’. Warning: alcohol is involved.
“Make a pint and a half of very strong tea in the usual manner; strain it, and pour it boiling (hot) on one pound and a quarter of loaf sugar. Add half a pint of rich sweet cream, and then stir in gradually a bottle of claret or of champaign. You may heat it to the boiling point, and serve it so, or you may send it round entirely cold, in glass cups.”
Not so much a refreshing pick-me-up as a party in a punch bowl.
The 1850s and 1860s were big decades for iced tea in the USA. Teetotalism was sweeping the land, transitioning from a moral crusade into a legally enforced political mandate as at least 14 states had adopted some form of alcohol prohibition by 1855. It was known rather dramatically as the Second Great Awakening, the radical belief that people must completely abstain from all intoxicating beverages. Bad news for booze. Good news for iced tea.
It was why a ton of articles and advertisements suddenly started appearing in regional US newspapers around this time. In 1856, a druggist in Richmond Virginia (No. 202 Main Street) called S. P. Semple: “Begs leave to inform his customers and the public that his SODA FOUNTAIN is now in full operation for the summer season, featuring choice syrups of the finest quality. Furthermore, the exhilarating effects of a glass of iced Tea or Coffee will speak for themselves to all who seek a true and healthful refreshment from the oppressive heat."
The following year, in 1857, the Saturday Evening Post ran an editorial to convince the world that tea was a warm-weather drink.
"Tea as a summer drink. Tea made strong, well sweetened, with good milk or better cream in it in sufficient quantity to give it a dark yellow color, and the whole mixture cooled in an ice chest, or by ice put into it, is one of the most delicious drinks that can be used. It is far safer than ice water, and more refreshing than any form of beer or soda. Let those who are exhausted by the mid-day sun try a glass of iced tea, and they will find their strength immediately restored."
The beverage also appeared in a domestic economy and household management book called Home Comforts: Or, Economy Illustrated, by Familiar Scenes of Every-day Life in 1855. Author Lillie Savery (a pseudonym for Solon Robinson) it is written in vignettes showing how everyday people live practically. In one of the scenes, a character says:
Last summer we got in the habit of taking the tea iced, and really thought it better than when hot.
In 1868, which endured an unprecedented (and deadly) heatwave across both the USA and the UK, iced tea came to the fore. On 6th July, the Boston Journal wrote, "During the heated term there is nothing so invigorating as iced tea. A slice of lemon no thicker than a wafer placed in each tumbler adds to the relish."
Then over the pond, a 25th July article in the UK’s Medical Times and Gazette also extolled its virtues in the heat:
Iced Tea to the Rescue! – The most delicious and sustaining beverage that can be drunk this weather is good strong tea cooled down with lumps of ice. It should be only slightly sweetened, without milk, and flavoured with a few slices of lemon, which are infused at the time the tea is first made. A jug of this ready at hand would suit the complaint of many of our readers to a T whilst the thermometer remains where it is and has been of late.
The Harrisburg Telegraph (the newspaper for Pennsylvania’s capital city) went all poetic when it said on 1st August: “Iced tea, with a small slice of lemon in it, is said to be decidedly ahead of love, limberger, or lager, as a summer exhilarator.”
(Limburger is a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese. Who knew it could be a summer exhilarator? Pennsylvania, huh?).
By the 1870s, iced tea was finding its way into American cookbooks, establishing itself as a proper national staple. There is even a reference to iced tea being something of an ‘American’ trend too in an 1874 edition of The Weekly Record of the Temperance Movement, which offered advice to its UK readers on ‘what to drink in hot weather’:
A good authority on this subject has declared that there are two beverages which, in weather such as the present, may be drunk with impunity and with gusto. They are, first, iced tea à la Russe, with lemon in it, or sweetened with candy, as worthy Mr. Thomas Cook has lately seen it consumed in the United States of America.
The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, published in Ohio in 1876 gives us some good advice about making iced tea. Compiled by women associated with the First Congregational Church in Marysville, the book includes some rather charming serving instructions. The tea was to be poured into a clean stone jug or glass bottle and served with broken ice arranged on a platter decorated with washed grape leaves.
Prepare tea in the morning, make stronger and sweeter than usual; strain and pour into a nice clean stone jug or glass bottle, set aside in the ice chest until ready to use. Drink from goblets without cream. Serve ice broken in small pieces on a platter nicely garnished with well washed grape leaves. Iced tea may be prepared from either green or black alone, but it is considered an improvement to mix the two.
There are many more examples of iced tea being enjoyed across the States, North and South, before, during and after the American Civil War, proving it was becoming a practical everyday household habit rather than an exotic curiosity.
Back in England, the 1879 edition of Mrs Beeton’s The Book of Household Management, an insanely popular cookery book and woman’s guide to running a Victorian household, reported on the dining habits at the English country houses:
It is customary at many houses during summer to give tennis or croquet teas. The meal is very informal, and often served out of doors. Iced tea, coffee, claret-cup, etc., are served, with sandwiches, pastry, cakes and other light viands. The tables are set under shady trees, and a couple of servants or members of the family are in attendance at them, the visitors themselves going to the table for what they may want.
Iced tea remained a popular tipple in higher-class circles in the UK for many years, as this quote from The Swindon Advertiser (of all places) on 12th August 1901 asserts:
Iced tea is being offered by hostesses at all the garden parties. It is placed in a crystal jug with slices of lemon, and served in shallow cups of old Dresden china
But what of Richard Blechynden and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis?
For a start, as we’ve seen, he didn’t come up with the idea of iced tea. He wasn’t even the first person to sell iced tea at a World’s Fair. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair & Columbian Exposition, a concessionaire called Mr N. B. Reed apparently grossed over $2,000 (about $75,000 today) from sales of iced tea.
That wasn’t even the first time iced tea was popular in an event of that size. There’s a fascinating 28th September 1890 article in the Nevada Noticer newspaper that talks about the quantities of ingredients needed for an event – in this case the 1890 Missouri State Reunion of Ex-Confederate Veterans.
“The following figures will convey some idea of the amount of provision used a Camp Jackson during the recent encampment. There were 4,800 pounds of bread, 11,705 pounds of beef, 407 pounds of ham, 21 sheep, 600 pounds of sugar, 6 bushels of beans, 60 gallon of pickles, and a wagonload of potatoes. It was all washed down with 2,220 gallons of coffee and 880 gallons of iced tea. The committee expended $3,000, a little in excess of the amount subscribed, for the entertainment of the old soldiers.”
But back to Blechynden and the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. In the East India Pavilion, which was designed to look like the tomb of Itimad-ud-Daulah in Agra, India, Blechynden was apparently offering free hot tea to everyone.
This was a period when tea merchants were keen to expand the market for tea from British-controlled India. The American market had traditionally favoured green tea imported from China, and promoters of Indian black tea wanted to change that. But the weather was against him. Because of the hot and humid summer (the highest recorded temperature was 93°F on 16th July), he soon realised his customers didn’t want what he was peddling.
So, he and his team went in another direction. He reportedly rigged a system where the hot, freshly brewed tea was poured into large bottles and inverted onto stands. The liquid then flowed downward through a series of lead pipes (yes, lead!) immersed in ice, rapidly cooling it. He then gave this free iced tea to all thirsty fair goers that passed by.
After the fair, Blechynden took his lead pipe ‘invention’ to New York City, where he offered free iced tea to shoppers at Bloomingdale Brothers Department Store, turning tea into a trendy summertime drink for rich urban customers too.
Richard Blechynden’s contribution wasn't discovering that tea could be iced. It was helping persuade more people that cold tea was worth drinking. And that, in the drink’s world, can be every bit as significant as inventing something from scratch.
After St Louis, iced tea’s star rose exponentially. It was now properly cemented as a national drink in the USA, helped even more by another surge in teetotalism during Prohibition, 1920 to 1933. Today, it’s said that about 69 million Americans drink iced tea every day – making it the largest and most popular market for the drink in the world. About 85% of all tea consumed in the United States is served iced. That’s mad. Not bad for a drink that seemed to originate in Italy, right?
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