Spiced Tea / Goodbye Lie Diaries-Miss Ella

spiced tea warming in slow cooker

I hadn't made Spiced Tea in a decade.  With fall in the north Florida air, the thought of it made me wonder if the eleven other girls at my bunko party would like it.  Boy howdy, did they ever!  Half of them asked for the recipe!  The scent filled the house, making it all the cozier.  Hot or cooled, it is simply lovely and easy to make.  There is sugar in it, so keep that in mind, and make it a treat for the whole family on those rainy or snowy days. 

 

You’ll need:

 

2 cups of Tang

3/4 cup decaf instant tea with lemon

1 cup sugar or more to taste

1 1/2 teaspoon cloves

 

Mix all the above ingredients with a spoon or shake well in a container with a tight lid.  Spoon 1 tablespoon into a pretty teacup and fill the cup with hot water.  Serve with cookies or biscuits.  It may be served hot, at room temperature or chilled, but first heat the mixture and stir to dissolve the Tang and sugar and meld the flavors.

 

You can make several servings at once and keep your spiced tea warm in the slow cooker.  I used 8 tablespoons and 8 cups of water.  The ladies ladled refills as they went from table to table between bunko rounds!  There is plenty of powder mixture left to last me fall.                             

                                                             - Jane Marie

***

1880s

Fernandina, Florida

 

Miss Ella

Miss Ella writes:  We serve a similar spiced tea on our Aqua Verde ships. We call it Sweet Orange Tea.  Our chefs make vast amounts as you might imagine for all our passengers, so at the house our recipe is simple.  One teabag, a good squeeze of an orange, a sprinkle of sugar and a dash of cloves.  We don’t measure this exactly and there seems no way to make it incorrectly, unless you forget to add the sugar.  What is this decaf instant tea of which you write?  Instant tea?  My, my, how everything  happens so quickly in your time.  I wonder if I could get used to life zipping by so fast.  Then again, perhaps you accomplish more in a day than we do.  By the way, we, too, often serve the spice tea at our bunko gatherings, just because it is so delightful.  

Miss Ella is the  matriarch of the Dunnigan family in The Goodbye Lie historical romance series set on Amelia Island, Florida in the 1800s.  She oversees what is served on the family's passenger line, which travels from Fernandina, Florida south to Miami and north to New England.