Kitchen

[Marp]

1879 - The oldest sweet tea recipe (ice tea) in print comes from a community cookbook called Housekeeping in Old Virginia, by Marion Cabell Tyree, published in 1879:

If you want iced tea without sugar ask for unsweet tea.  I'm in my 70s and sweet tea has always been the default served in restaurants.

[proudlyfromNJ]

Around here the order would be iced tea. It obviously comes cold and never with sugar. If you want it sweet you add sugar after it is served.

[tiny 2]

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@Carolina925 wrote:

It sounds strange to me when people refer to "sweet tea". I'm southern and never have I heard this term before recently. Yes, it's such a little thing but sounds wonky to me. I've noticed in the past couple of years that, when I ask for iced tea, I'm usually asked if I want "sweet tea". No, I don't want sweet tea; when they bring it out, it's always with a tea spoon and a container with all kinds of sweetener alongside. I must be the only person alive who doesn't take sugar in their tea...does that make me special?

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@Carolina925 

I grew up in the south also. We had fresh tea every evening year round. Enough was made to last through the next day. It was sweet. If you ordered iced tea in a restaurant then it was assumed you wanted it sweet. You had to specify if you wanted unsweetened tea and usually there would be a "look".

I never embraced sweetened iced tea. I always loved mine unsweetened. The 4 o'clock afternoon hot tea in cooler weather, I like with a thin round slice of lemon studded with a couple of whole cloves, a little bit of sugar and a decent china teacup every day. There were 3 constants at our table. Fresh tea, hot biscuits, hot cornbread.

[Puppy Lips]

I ONLY drink unsweet tea.  I don't need the extra calories and I like unsweet tea, hot or cold, just fine.

[froggy]

I am from the south and as far as I am concerned sweet tea is iced tea. I di love my iced tea sweet but don't need the calories so every few days I make a gallon of iced tea sweetened with Splenda. If I order sweet tea in a restaurant I assume it will be sweetened with sugar.

[Carolina925]

@zitawins , I never heard the term "creamy potatoes"! As for tea, there were only two kinds when I was growing up: iced and hot, and in restaurants you always added your sugar, which is kind of inpossible to get iced tea sweet since the sugar doesn't like to melt. If we went to someone's house, we'd get sweetened tea, sometimes thick as syrup--yikes!

[CoffeeNut]

I'm from the south and remember traveling to the midwest once and I asked the waitress for sweet tea.  She said,  HUH ?   What's that.  No one has ever asked me for that before. 

[Sooner]

I am from Oklahoma and we drink iced tea 365 days of the year, without sugar.  Neither of us like sweet tea.  So when we go to the South we quickly remember to ask for it unsweetened!  Here if you order "tea" it's iced (full glass of ice) and unsweetened. 

Hot tea or cold, sometimes we might add about 2 teaspoons of sugar to a strong assertive black tea--and that's 2 tsp. for the whole pitcher.

We drink a lot of hot tea as well, no sugar there either except for really strong breakfast tea and then about 1/2 tsp. and some milk. 

[riley1]

No sugar for me, thanks. I drink hot tea or iced tea and never put sugar in it.

[chickenbutt]

The notion of adding a bunch of sugar to tea never appealed to me.

One thing that made me chuckle was seeing a thread of somebody asking for a recipe for sweet tea.   Uh, it's tea and sugar - or probably more likely sugar and tea.     

One time, when I lived in Europe in the 70s, I recall being at a restaurant in some country and asking for an iced tea.   I guess it wasn't a thing there, as they brought me a cup of hot tea and an ice cube.   I was gracious, of course, but it was kind of funny at the time.