Sweet Tea Pie

I'm not sure what to start defending first: this sweet tea pie that needs perfecting; or the magazine — Garden & Gun, with one of the worst names of any magazine I've ever encountered — which shot me an email newsletter with the recipe.

Every time I hear the name of the magazine Garden & Gun — an absolutely fabulous and beautiful "Southern lifestyle" magazine that launched in 2007, featuring all things Southern in a stylish and smart manner, and to which I happen to subscribe — I want to violently shake whoever decided Garden & Gun (an obscure reference to a '70s disco in Charleston, SC) was a name that would attract people, as opposed to scare them away.
Yes, there are gun articles in almost every issue of Garden & Gun, but they are in the line of erudite articles about gun-loving Ernest Hemingway, or sentimental stories of bonding with a favorite hunting dog.

The other 95 percent of the magazine is about Southern art, food, gardens, architecture, design, history,and culture. If you're a Southerner living outside of the South like I am, there is almost always an article in each issue that touches upon a fond memory or place that is dear to one's heart. If you grew up in the South or live in the South, you should put Garden & Gun on your wish list, even if you will never touch a gun in your life. Trust me.
Now onto the pie.

The sweet tea pie recipe comes from Martha Hall Foose, a Southern-born pastry chef and cookbook author. Martha Hall Foose presents sweet tea pie in her James Beard Award-winning cookbook, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, and she also contributed her sweet tea pie recipe to Nancy McDermot's cookbook, Southern Pies, but I came about the recipe in a newsletter from Garden & Gun (sign up here, if you like).

This recipe got immediately bookmarked, but, as always, I took a while to make it. Essentially, this pie puts a new Southern twist — sweet tea — on the traditional Southern chess pie. As one of the stories goes, chess pie got it's name when someone said the pie was "just pie" — because there ain't nothin' fancy is chess pie, just eggs, butter, and sugar — and at the end of the line "just pie" transmuted into chess pie.Martha Hall Foose's sweet tea pie gets it's sweet tea flavor from the addition of strong brewed tea in the pie batter. And that batter contains about twice as much butter — two sticks!! — than most chess pies, not to mention eight egg yolks. This ain't no diet pie!

And since this pie is so indulgent, I haven't made it again to perfect the recipe to my liking. I found the sweet tea flavor to be too subtle. The recipe only calls for 3/4 cup of strong brewed tea without suggesting how many tea bags to stick into 3/4 cup of water. I went with two (added another bag after I snapped the photo), thinking that would be plenty for such a small amount of liquid. I suggest more. How many? I don't know, but just use more.
I also found the lemon flavor to mask the subtlety of the tea. Next time, I'm using half, if not less than half the amount of lemon zest called for.

Also, this pie had to be baked for much longer than called for, but, in the end, the pie did set. The pie is even firmer the next day served chilled.

I'd like to try this pie again, but I certainly don't want to be left home alone with a two-stick-of-butter and eight-egg-yolk pie. Invite me to a picnic, and I'll make it for you!Sweet Tea Pie
adapted from Martha Hall Foose
makes 1 9-inch pie

pastry for a 9-inch single crust pie (store bought or basic pie crust)
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter, room temperature
8 egg yolks
3/4 cup strong brewed tea, room temperature
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest (next time, I'm using 1/2 teaspoon or less)
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt

• In a large bowl, beat sugar and butter with a mixer until fluffy.
  
• Add egg yolks to the butter and sugar mixture, one at a time, beating well after adding each egg yolk.
• Add tea, lemon juice, and lemon zest to the batter, and beat until mixed well.
• Add flour, cornmeal, and salt to the batter and stir in with a whisk until incorporated.
• Pour batter into the pie crust.
• Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven in the lower part of the oven (I suggest placing a baking sheet below the pie to catch spills) for 45 minutes (mine baked for 70 minutes), or until the edges are puffy and the center is firm.
  
• Cool pie completely before serving. (I enjoyed the pie best refrigerated the day after.)
  

Thai Tea Ice Cream

Behold the first ice cream of the season! I call it Thai tea ice cream...or "the ice cream that didn't wanna." Let me explain...

This ice cream officially kicks off my 2009 ice cream making season, but was supposed to kick off the 2008 ice cream season. I had been dreaming of Thai tea ice cream all 2007/2008 winter long, and when the weather warmed up and it was time to break out the ice cream maker, I could not for the life of me find Thai tea any where.

I could find individual packets of instant Thai tea, but no bags of loose leaf tea and spices, or what is sometimes called Thai tea powder. And I'm fully aware of the awesome powers of purchasing goods online (Amazon is my savior), but was determined to find the tea at one of the many Asian markets along Washington Ave. in Philly. It was a principle thing. There's also Thai tea syrup, and you can even make it yourself.Well, I never found the tea all summer long (didn't look too hard, just whenever I was in a store). Cut to this past winter, and the tea magically appeared at some market the boy was shopping at, and he thoughtfully bought me a pack since he knew I had been on the hunt for quite some time.

Yes! Thai tea ice cream is going to happen!Not so fast! Doh, I forgot to put the ice cream freezer bowl in the freezer. The bowl usually lives in the freezer all the time, ever at the ready, but I took the bowl out for the winter to make more room in the freezer.

Plans dashed, I settled on a day late. I tweaked a Vietnamese coffee ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, but the ice cream turned out way too sweet and too strongly tea flavored. Ugghhhh!

The next day, work got in the way, so there was no re-do.

Finally, the following day I tweaked my tweaked recipe and made a Thai tea ice cream that's fit to show off. One year and a couple of tries later.

I hope you enjoy the recipe; it's quite good, and is possibly the most anticipated ice cream of my ice cream making career. Worth the wait? I would have preferred to have it last year!Thai Tea Ice Cream
makes about 1 quart

After steeping the loose leaf tea, you'll need some way to strain the tea. Many who regularly make Thai tea have these large tea socks that do the job. I did not have a tea sock, nor did I want to buy one. I found that the coffee press I had worked just fine.

1/3 cup loose leaf Thai tea
2 1/2 cups water
1 cup sweetened condensed milk
1 cup half and half

• Add 2 1/2 cups of hot/boiling water to loose leaf Thai tea, and steep for 20 minutes (this is more water than the brewed tea called for in the recipe, because some of the water will be absorbed by the leaves). Strain tea (I pushed the French press plunger down) and let cool to room temperature.
  
• Mix 1 1/2 cups brewed tea, sweetened condensed milk, and half and half in a large bowl.
• Process mixture in an ice cream machine. Chill overnight in the freezer before serving.

Afternoon Tea At Hotel Du Pont

Not one to play with dolls or dream of ponies (seriously, girls, the horsey fantasies are sick), I preferred to play war games with my best boy buds and climb trees as a child. But despite being a tomboy, I did fancy breaking out the tea set every once in a while to serve my stuffed animals a proper, if but imaginary, afternoon tea.

If you were once a little girl (are there any boys out there who played tea?), you can live out your childhood right in downtown Wilmington in Hotel du Pont's Lobby Lounge. That's right! The stodgy and elegant, rich-grandparent-approved Hotel du Pont serves up afternoon tea and little girl fantasies on weekend afternoons. You don't even know how giddy I was to finally make a reservation for a proper afternoon tea and strike though an item that's been on my to-do list for years.

Afternoon tea with dainty tea sandwiches, scones, petit fours, and, lets not forget, tea is such a simple nicety that everyone - stuffed animals, little girls, women, old dames, and even boys and men - should take the time to enjoy it's frivolity.
We selected the cheapest ($18 per person) of the three tea services which include tea, tea sandwiches, scones, and petit fours. The two other services are identical to the service we chose, but include champagne and chambord (I believe priced at $23 and $28 per person).

After choosing one of a selection of loose leaf teas printed on the menu, a tea pot filled with tea leaves and hot water is brought to your table. You then place the strainer over the cup and pour yourself some tea. The very attentive servers will refill your tea pot as you drink it down.
There is no specifying of which tea sandwiches are brought to your table, but the servers kindly removed the chicken salad sandwich from our plates (tables of three or more have their tea sandwiches brought to the table on a tiered stand), and returned with a few repeats of tea sandwiches. On our plates were smoked salmon sandwiches, watercress and Boursin cheese sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, and roasted pepper sandwiches. Man, do I love tea sandwiches. So simple, yet so classy!After polishing off the teas sandwiches, a basket with two different scones arrived with a tee-tiny pot of strawberry preserves and a small plate of Devonshire clotted cream and lemon clotted cream. The larger dried apricot and walnut scone was sweeter than the small currant scone, and the clotted cream was an indulgence that I would never eat alone at home.

Believe it or not, at this point we were actually stuffed. Afternoon tea is quite filling, so big boys don't shy away if you think the servings are dainty. Finally, we got the tiered stand! Presentation is everything. Little cones filled with cream and topped with a blueberry, the tiniest madelines you've ever seen, lemon jam tarts topped with strawberry mousse, towers of chocolate and chocolate mousse, strawberry jam tarts topped with strawberry mousse, and chocolate dipped almond macaroons - we ate everything!

I then died and went to little girl heaven.

Best part - other than revisiting a childhood fantasy - was watching a darling little girl slathering gobs of preserves and cream on a scone while exclaiming to her grandmother,"I want to live here forrreeeever...because it's fancy." Me too, me too.

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Afternoon tea is served on Saturday and Sunday at 3:00, 3:30, and 4:00 in the Lobby Lounge. This means you need a reservation, but I have no idea how anyone on the reservation list actually got their reservation. We called on three separate days at many different times of the day and could never get anyone to pick up the phone when we were redirected to wherever it is you're redirected to make reservations. We finally told the general operator our troubles, and the operator took down our info and promised to walk our reservation over. Someone dropped the ball somewhere, and when we arrived we did not have a table. But the excellent wait staff prepared us a table lickity-split. This frazzled the wait staff a little because they only prepare so many tables and make so many sandwiches, so any unexpected guests throw a cog in the wheel. Make a reservation, but good luck!

And I'm sure you've heard of the coats-required dress code of Hotel du Pont's more formal dining room, The Green Room. Tomboys and haters of formal wear will be glad to know that the Lobby Lounge only recommends business casual attire.

Afternoon Tea in the Lobby Lounge at Hotel du Pont
11th and Market Streets, Wilmington, DE, 19801
800-441-9019
302-594-3100
Sat. and Sun.: 3:00, 3:30, and 4:00 p.m.
reservation required
business casual attire