A tale of tea, time, and red hots

Trying to recreate my mother’s spiced tea is tricker than it seems, and Lipton is to blame

My mother passed away in 2010. As anyone knows who’s ever lost a family member, sometimes the little connections you can make to their memory mean a lot.

My mother had a recipe for an instant hot spiced tea. The recipe called for instant tea, Tang, Country Time lemonade mix, cinnamon and clove. The dry ingredients would be mixed and kept in a jar, and then you would spoon some out and add hot water when you wanted to make the tea.

Weirdly enough, because of the different texture between the instant tea granules and the two sugar-based instant drinks, they didn’t want to completely mix, and so the jar became a sort of work of art, with pale layers of mostly drink mix and darker layers of mostly tea. It didn’t seem to matter much if you gave the jar a good shake before spooning some out, though.

When we were kids, a special treat was to be able to put cinnamon-flavored Red Hots candies in a big steamy mug of spiced tea.

A few years ago, one of my brothers shared Mom’s old spiced tea recipe with our other two siblings and me. It was fun to have a jar here at my office at work and be able to make it. I went looking for Red Hots candies at…