Sip of Summer
A Southerner returns home from the North and brings her tea punch with her. by Erin Z. Bass When Leslie McKinney Bass moved to Chicago from Nashville 22 years ago, she had no idea she’d miss the South so much. Blues music and the sounds of banjo and harmonica drifting from the city’s streets helped to ease her homesickness, but “I always longed for home and whenever I heard that music, there was a sense of place, sky, water, seasons,” she says. “I missed that romantic part of being in the South.” It was a recipe passed down from her grandmother that gave Bass a way to “sip her blues away.” With a base of lime and orange juice, tea punch was a staple in the Bass family. “We would have Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s after church and we always drank it there,” Bass says. “I think I was, out of my four sisters, the one that gulped it down the most because I really liked all that sugar in there.” While grandmother Polly had her own guarded recipe for the punch, so did her friends and neighbors. In Nashville, tea punch was served all over town. “Our national bank had something