Sweet Tea 2025

There is one thing Southerners do not know.

When you cross the Mississippi River and sit down in a restaurant, it is cheap entertainment to start off by ordering “sweet tea.”

They don’t have it. They might not know about it. They can’t make it.

You’ll get a glass of UN sweetened tea with a couple of packs of that hideous pink stuff that doesn’t totally dissolve and tastes chemical.

By now Mid-westerners know about sweet tea like they might know about boiled peanuts, but their customers don’t expect it and they don’t bother.

The Kansas Woman has been here much longer than she was ever “there,” and I assumed she had never made sweet tea.

That’s what I get for thinking. The KW says they had sweet tea in the house all the time and her father loved it. Her grandmother made it with that wonderful product of chemical research, saccharine.

Sweet tea was not available in the local café, but they just never thought anything about it.

It was just something she didn’t think of making here. It didn’t come up, like Kool-Aid has never come up here.

I grew up on sweet tea. My relatives all kept mint patches, usually by the back door.

Mint was happy in the spot where my grandmother tossed the dish water.

My mother also kept a couple of mint patches. One of them was spearmint, which she dried in the sun on newspapers and kept in Mason jars.

My mom didn’t have dish water to toss out the back door because she always had a sink. Otherwise dish water is water in which she washed dishes.

A few years ago I had a craving for sweet tea and was embarrassed that I didn’t know how to make it. It didn’t occur to me that the KW knew.

I asked among discrete women I knew who might give me directions.

Anita Estroff is one of the best cooks I’ve ever known, but I haven’t been in her kitchen in decades. Anita didn’t have to think about it. She patiently walked me through making sweet tea but opined that I was “overthinking” it.

Anita was right, of course, and ended the conversation with a reminder that I should also start my own mint patch. She was right about that also. Southern sweet tea is better with a sprig of mint.

Sweet tea is not a chemistry exercise, and anybody who can boil water should be able to make sweet tea.

It is so simple even a man can do it.

joenphillips@yahoo.com