ARTICLES by the Kitchen Madonna :: Let this be a place where those who hunger can be fed.

The Kitchen Madonna Expounds on the House Wine of the South
July 13th, 2006

I recently moved back South after living out West. Somehow, I learned to make and drink unsweetened tea. Yes, I turned my back on my heritage. I might as well have gone ahead and stomped on my ancestors' grave. Auctioned the family Bible on eBay. However, now that I'm back, I'm luxuriating in sweet tea like a good prodigal daughter, and I can't get enough of the house wine of the South. And I decided to get at the core of our iced tea beliefs This isn't as easy as it might sound. I met with a great deal of resistance.

First of all, so many people from other parts of the country have moved here and die-hard Southerners can be elusive although exceedingly friendly and effusive on the surface. These people keep their iced tea secrets to themselves, locked away with the other family secrets, and they weren't about to reveal them to a recent turncoat expatriate such as myself. I mean, I'm not sure I'd trust myself.

So I turned to the restaurant scene. Many high-toned restaurants simply refused to discuss their tea with me. If I had inquired about their wine list, I would have received a different response I am sure. At not a few places, the proprietors or their designated deputy pointedly told me that iced tea did not complement their cuisine.

However, once I identified a well-defined set of restaurants who proudly serve tea, I came up against another kind of resistance: no one wants to reveal if they use industrial syrup concentrates. The mythic granny in the kitchen who boils kettles full of water and uses old fashioned tea bags still has a hold on the Southern culinary imagination. And then there are the flavored bottled teas you can pull out of the cooler. Somehow that is just too individualistic to count as Southern iced tea because if it isn't poured from the communal pitcher and shared amongst a group of people, then you might as well be drinking unsweet iced tea in Central Park by yourself. And where is the Southernness or the magic in that?

Need we say that the tea must be sweet? And brewed with straightforward black pekoe tea bags? And lemons, quartered, not squeezed? Mint can be included if it is fresh and instead of the lemons.

On my iced tea travels, I learned that the Prohibition era - 1920 to 1933 - had a great deal to do with the popularization of iced tea. With the scarcity of illegal beer, wine and alcohol, folks just had to find other alternatives to whetting their whistle. While Southerners were celebrated for their enterprising ability to produce moonshine, iced tea just never lost it's hold. Maybe it is really an unconscious substitute, so if you see a Southerner sucking on glass after glass of iced tea, turn a blind eye.

If you are old school Southern, you don't call it iced tea. It is ice tea. Period.

For the money, I suggest you find yourself an old fashioned Southern granny and let her fix you some tea. It won't cost you anything, and I bet she'll serve you some homemade macaroni and cheese, fresh green beans, fried green tomatoes, marinated cucumber slices, cornbread, and peach cobbler.

And that is as intoxicating as any fermented grape juice because she'll be an old school kitchen madonna and make you feel like a prince or princess for a day.