Is This You?

Iced Drinks

Recently I was given a heavenly recipe for iced coffee. Iced coffee has been around for a very long time. Actually since the mid-1800s, with origins tracing back to an Algerian drink called Mazagran. The first crossing of my path and iced coffee was when I was working at a lunch counter in a casino called the Mustang Club. Uh, not THAT infamous John Conforte’s Mustang Ranch. No I worked in a small club and restaurant in Ely, Nevada and although there were things that, at the time, I had no idea about, my job was making and serving eggs and bacon or burgers and fries and a lot of coffee.      

One of my regulars sat down one hot afternoon and asked for an iced coffee. I must have had a look of confusion on my young face as he proceeded to tell me how to make the drink he wanted. It was early in the 1970’s and a Venti double caramel Frappuccino with an extra shot and whipped cream was but a drink of science fiction—if at all. 

This nice man was kind and told me step by step to use a tall glass, fill it to the top with ice and put an iced tea spoon in the glass. Making sure the spoon goes all the way to the bottom of the glass. “The spoon,” he said, “never make iced coffee without the spoon.” I of course thought he was just kidding but it turns out that the spoon was the secret ingredient to making a true glass of iced coffee.

Next step was to pour hot off the burner coffee into the glass of ice with spoon all the way to the bottom. Now I was not a science nerd, or even a science nerdette. But! Yes, a hot glass bottomed “but.” I knew that hot coffee in a glass could lead to nothing but trouble. That little piece of information came after I had put a hot glass coffee pot under a faucet spewing cold water and the ensuing explosion told me all I needed to know about cold meeting hot. Or in this case, hot meeting cold.  But hey, what could happen? I can tell you that my arm didn’t seem long enough to hold away from that tall glass of ice with that lonely spoon stuffed in around the cubes and set all the way to the bottom of the glass. But I began to pour, shakily. There was a little bit of tink, crack, tink-tink in the glass and I held my breath. But the glass stood firm and the coffee poured right through the ice. Of course I learned that the stainless spoon absorbed the heat faster than the hot coffee could hurt the glass. The man then put four huge spoons of sugar and some real cream in, stirred and slurped up this new concoction. Tada. I had learned to make iced coffee before it was what we know today as iced coffee.

It would be some thirty years before a friend took me to my first coffee house and “taught” me how to order the aforementioned Venti double caramel Frappuccino with an extra shot and whipped cream. I can do it now, like an expert.

This silly memory got me thinking of all the drinks I make during the summer that are poured over ice. So here we go…

Of course summer would not be summer without iced tea. I learned many moons ago how to make sun tea. You put water and tea bags, regular tea bags, in a glass jar and set it out in the sun. The magic happens as the water warms up and the tea bags let go of their brown goodness. So iced tea is a big, summer gulp. If you put more sugar than water in your tea, apparently, you will have sweet tea. Personally I use one pink packet per glass. Yes, I have been schooled as to the badness of my pink packets. Moving on.

Lemonade is a must as is Kool-Aid. The flavors are many. But in my world, less sugar is better. Besides, if you have a drink without REAL sugar, and you spill it outside, a thousand flies from a thousand miles will not appear and have a party in the liquid. Flies don’t care for sugar free stuff. So there is that.

Then you move onto alcohol. Very subjective but also many of the things made with alcohol can also be made in the virgin way. No alcohol. Like a Virgin Margarita is actually a limeade slushy. Very refreshing. With or without salt on the rim. Stay cool.

Trina lives in Diamond Valley, north of Eureka, Nevada. She loves to hear from readers. Email her at [email protected]

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