Iced Tea

NEAR EXIT 351, I-40, TEXAS-- --April 1985 - exactly 22 years ago - in a Sports Illustrated article, author George Plimpton introduced the world to a baseball prospect like none other, a pitcher named Sidd Finch whose eccentricities were as unbelievable as his fastball, clocked by New York Mets officials at 168 mph. One week after Plimpton exposed the Mets' top-secret prodigy, Finch disappeared. Or at least he seemed to. Perhaps he's who you really are. Do you have anything that would prove it?

Andy Williams was just plain wrong. For the party-panicky, the holidays are definitely not "the most wonderful time of the year." It may not be the going-out part that bothers the festivity-phobic. It's the terrifying idea that people might just stop by. And they're going to expect you to feed them. Sometimes your own family does it to you. "I had a lady call me to say that her husband was bringing home 10 people that night," said Heather Joye Bender of LifesCelebrations Inc. in Skokie, Ill. Bender has been a party planner for about six years.

Kaye Goble of Salisbury, N.C., was looking for a recipe for her son for Mango Iced Tea. She said he was served the tea when he stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in Savannah, Ga., and found it to be very refreshing and fruity without being overly sweet. Ellen Bourdeaux of Oxford, Miss., sent in a recipe for a version of Mango Iced Tea that comes courtesy of Bobby Flay and the Food Network. The recipe is easy to prepare and quite a nice twist on regular iced tea. I had no trouble finding the mango nectar in my local grocery store.

HOW DO YOU MAKE HOMEMADE ICED TEA? Most tea producers sell blends especially suited to serving cold. The designated iced-tea blends are more commonly found in Southern markets than in local ones, but you can make perfectly good iced tea from regular hot-tea blends. I did that with three mass-market teas: Lipton, Tetley Classic Blend and Bigelow English Teatime. But pouring hot tea over ice results in an unpalatably weak solution. To do it right, you have to cool your tea to room temperature.

WHEN YOUR DAY is devoted to drinking iced tea, sitting on a porch reading novels and thinking about what's for supper, you know you are on vacation. That is what I did recently. It was an immobile type of family vacation, one where the brood hunkers down and follows the daily regimen of eating, drinking, taking a dip (in the Atlantic) with pauses for reading and napping. There is also the mobile type of family vacation. In that one, the clan goes airborne, visits far-flung sights and generally gets its horizons broadened.

The Big Bad Wolf hooked me, I have to admit, with his description of the collard greens: large leaf greens, not chopped, cooked with fatback the way they should be. I love barbecue, but I don't love the nondescript sides that often come with it. At the Big Bad Wolf's House of Barbeque, just about everything is made fresh with big, bold flavors. And then the back story intrigued me. For the last eight years, Scott Smith (otherwise known as the Wolf) worked at fine dining restaurants, including Charleston, Le Petit Louis and Corks.

Martha Stewart kept a few bottles of it on the defense table during her federal trial in New York. Ben Affleck drank it during an interview with Playboy. Teen-agers gulp it out of giant bottles with trippy graphics. And ladies-who-lunch sip it out of crystal glasses with a slice of lemon. Yes, we're talking about iced tea, the unofficial drink of summer. Around the country, iced tea is all the rage. According to Joe Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the U.S.A., Americans spent $2 billion on ready-to-drink iced tea last year, 10 times more than we spent in 1990.

I was incinerating papers in the back yard one day when the wind changed and my hand was badly burned. I rushed into the house, and my daughter, who did not know anything had happened, handed me a glass of iced tea she had just made. I took it and put my hand down into it. The pain of the burn soon eased, and the burn healed with no scarring. Without the treatment, I'm sure it would have left a scar. I have tried this on other occasions with great success. I have also tried using ice water, but the pain lasts longer, and there is a scar.

Southerners have a rich tradition of making iced drinks an important part of their summer entertaining. I spent my childhood in the South, where the thermometer hovered daily in the 90s from May to September, and I remember well the joys of sitting on the porch, sipping a tall glass of iced tea or lemonade on a hot, humid day. My mother, my grandmother, my aunts, just about everyone in our family had a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator, ready to...

Graduation season is in full flower, which means many colleges are bringing out their "reception tea," a dressed-up version of iced tea that hits the spot for proud and thirsty parents. As Fred Thompson notes in his book, Iced Tea: 50 Recipes for Refreshing Tisanes, Infusions, Coolers, and Spiked Teas (Harvard Common Press, 2002, $10.95), reception teas are a tradition at many smaller colleges, especially in warmer climates. These teas are made for ceremonial occasions, whether graduations or homecomings, and therefore earn a sentimental spot in the hearts of many alums.