Iced Tea & Iced Coffee (Sat. Eve. Post, 1857)

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   "Legend has it" that iced tea was invented at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.  These two long, excellent notes were found on the American Periodical Series online.  I apologize in advance for the typing mistakes.


   14 February 1857, SATURDAY EVENING POST, pg. 2:
   _TEA AS A SUMMER DRINK._
   Frederick Sala, writing from Russia to Dickens's Household Words, mentions that on a table near him stands "a largish tumbler filled with a steaming liquid of a golden color in which floats a thin slice of lemon.  It is TEA: the most delicious, the most soothing, the most thirst-allaying drink you can have in summertime, and in Russia."
   Tea, flavored with the slice of lemon, we have never tried; neither are we prepared to recommend as a summer beverage tea steaming hot, as Sala does.  But tea made strong, (as _we_ like it--or as strong as you like it,) 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 to the temperature of ice-water, is "the most delicious, the most soothing, the most thirst allaying drink" we have ever treated ourselves or friends to.  We know of nothing to compare with it for deliciousness or refreshment.  It cheers, but not inebriates.  Its stimulus is gentle; make a note of this now, and when the summer fervor visits you, and you feel, with Sydney Smith, that for the sake of coolness you could get out of your flesh and sit in your bones, try our specific of ice-cold tea.  Juleps, cobblers and such things, sink to utter insignificance beside it.  They are only temporarily refreshing, and fire the blood after the five minutes following their imbibition.  Soda is folly; it inflates one painfully with carbonic gas, and adds to the discomfort heat produces.  Ice-water is unsatisfying; you drink till you feel water-logged, and derive no benefit.  Ice-cream is the only preparation fit to be mentioned with out cold tea.  Some of our restaurant and saloon keepers would do well to keep this mixture among their summer refreshments.  We feel sure that it would pay them pecuniarily to do so.  The beverage only needs to be known to be popular.


   29 August 1857, SATURDAY EVENING POST, pg. 2:
   TEA AS A SUMMER DRINK.--A little editorial of ours with the above caption has been going the rounds of the city and country press without credit.  Of course, the latter circumstance is, as Toots would say, of no consequence, but one of the country papers prints the article with the concluding remark, "So says Dickens," which induces us to say that Dickens never said anything ofthe kind, but that ours is the voice that sounded the praise of iced tea.  And, by the way, let us remark that iced coffee, with sugar and cream, is a sumemr beverage that goes to the exhausted spot most effectually.  We wonder that some of our saloon keepers don't advertise those delightful drinks "which cheer but not inebriate," among their sodas and water ices and creams, all of which are inferior to them both in refreshment and sustaining power.  But improvement, as Burke said of confidence, is a plant of slow growth, and we suppose it will be a century before the public finds out what luxuries iced tea and coffee are in the summer solstice.

(A century?  A prophetic little food item from the SATURDAY EVENING POST--ed.)