Sweet Tea

Cold tea predates sweet tea as commonly served today by decades. American and English cookbooks from the early nineteenth century already carried recipes for chilled tea punches, made with green tea and heavily spiked with alcohol, under names such as Regent's Punch ^{1 2}. The oldest printed recipe close to the modern, non-alcoholic drink appears in Marion Cabell Tyree's 1879 Housekeeping in Old Virginia, which called for green tea steeped in boiling water, strained over ice, and sweetened with granulated sugar ¹.

Black tea did not replace green in these recipes until around the turn of the twentieth century, driven largely by cheaper imports from India, Ceylon and parts of Africa displacing the Chinese green tea that had dominated American cookbooks until then ¹. Richard Blechynden's iced tea stand at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is frequently credited with inventing the drink, but the timeline does not support that: printed recipes and restaurant menus already carried it before the fair, and Blechynden's stand is better understood as a popularising moment than an invention ¹.

Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, gave the drink a further push as a respectable substitute for the alcoholic punches it had partly descended from, and by the 1930s sweetened iced tea had settled into the form served today, appearing in nearly every Southern cookbook of the period ². Its association with the American South specifically (rather than with iced tea generally, which is drunk far more widely) is a product of that mid-century period, and it has stayed tied to Southern identity closely enough that Georgia's state legislature considered a bill in 2003 that would have required restaurants to serve it ².