As the weather continues to get warmer, demand for a Southern staple is increasing — a tall glass of iced tea.
WFDD listener Judith Rush recently asked how exactly the beverage became the drink of the South. For this edition of Carolina Curious, WFDD's DJ Simmons spoke with an award-winning food writer and educator to learn more.
Food writer and host of The Key Ingredient on PBS, Sheri Castle, wants people to know there’s a clear difference between iced tea and sweet tea.
“Iced tea is tea that has been chilled, both chilled when it was made and then poured over ice for serving," she says. "Sweet tea is tea that is sweetened when it is made, which is different from trying to stir sugar in iced tea at the table."
Castle says iced tea became more common around World War II.
“You take sugar being available again, once it was no longer rationed, you take the proliferation of access to ice and refrigeration, and you have a beverage that can be made in the home,” she says.
But Castle says the first records of iced tea are actually Midwestern and Northern, not Southern. How the drink came to find its home below the Mason-Dixon line may have boiled down to a simple rationale:
“If you look at beverages that are popular globally, in very hot and humid climates, they tend to be caffeinated and highly sweetened,” Castle says.
Despite cultural and population shifts in the South over the years, and restaurants moving away from sweet tea to unsweet tea as their default, Castle says there’s still nothing quite like a cold glass on a hot day.
“A perfectly and properly brewed glass of sweet tea is a delicious thing," she says. "I mean, it's not just the sugar, it's the tannins. It's maybe a bit of acidity if you add lemon, but it is a very well-balanced, multifaceted thing to drink. It's a great companion for a lot of food.”
So, it seems this Southern staple is here to stay.