Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  LEMONGRASS INFUSION

  You don’t have to be too careful with lemongrass; it’s one of the most forgiving infusions. The hotter the water, the better, for releasing the essential oils.

  I use 2g of dried, cut lemongrass leaf per 150ml and leave it to steep for anything from ninety seconds to several hours.

  Once cool, it makes a divine iced tea. Unlike tea, it won’t oxidise or become bitter or flat over time.

  CHAPTER 27

  MICHOACÁN, MEXICO

  When you don’t want caffeine, there are so many beautiful herbs, like lemongrass, to infuse. The decaffeination of tea uses chemical solvents that strip away more than the caffeine. I have read research to suggest those solvents might in themselves be harmful. A pure herbal infusion might serve you better.

  Throughout this book I have interchanged the words ‘tea’ and ‘herbal infusion’ because we all do that. If we put a herb in hot water, leave it to steep and then drink the infused liquid, we call it ‘tea’ in English. It’s a linguistic tic that lumps all leafy beverages together under the catch-all term. But for the sake of clarity, herbs are not teas and they do not contain caffeine nor many of the wondrous properties locked into the tea leaf. When tea was first drunk in China it was considered a medicine. I’m not a scientist, or a quack, but a great deal of research suggests that tea is pretty good for you. You may scoff, especially given that I, with all my tea drinking, have had cancer twice. But I was born with a BRCA2 gene mutation that makes me highly susceptible. That I have lived this long is perhaps in no small way thanks to my tea consumption, alongside luck, great doctors and the NHS. If it does get me, please don’t blame the tea but rather my rickety DNA betraying me.

  Herbs, however, have their own medicinal properties. They are not the same as those found in tea, but they are nevertheless highly potent. Chamomile aids restful sleep. Mint is good for the digestion. A serious herbalist could list the beneficial properties of every plant, but I am chiefly interested in their flavour. Tea is my first love, but herbs can be every bit as fascinating and delicious, and I have, latterly, come to pursue them with almost as much devotion.

  I travelled into Mexico in pursuit of a rare herb that I had fallen for. I had been searching for some time for a plant called anise hyssop, which is a minty, aniseed-flavoured leaf I first tasted in New York. If you don’t like liquorice or mint, this probably won’t be the tea for you in its pure form. But it adds a little lift to many of my herbal blends, and I love it on its own as my last sip before bed. It works very well with toothpaste.

  First, however, I needed a farmer to grow and dry it for me. I had scouted around upstate New York and California without success. On meeting Diana Kennedy, one of the world’s most knowledgeable women about Mexican plants, I discovered the herb is not a native of the US but of Mexico. She explained that in Mexico it is known by many names, among them toronjil, and that she knew a German doctor who was growing it organically not far from where she lives in Michoacán. She invited me to visit her and offered to put us in touch.

  Diana is a truly extraordinary woman in her nineties. The chance to visit her in Mexico was an exciting enough escapade, beyond the chance to source a new herb. I knew importing a pungent leafy green herb from an area synonymous with Mexico’s narcotics trade was never going to be easy. But the easiest way is not always the grandest adventure.

  In her Michoacán drawing room, built around the trunk of a tree that stretched through the house, Diana told me how her husband, a New York Times correspondent, had brought her to Mexico and not long after died of a brain haemorrhage. Instead of returning to her native Britain, she stayed on, making it her life’s work to learn and teach and write about the abundance of Mexico’s native flora, and the ancient cooking techniques of its people. She showed me a photo taken in New York in the 1980s of herself in chef’s whites surrounded by every famous chef of the time, many of whom are still household names. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I wrote and I cooked, I taught, darling, and of course I fucked my way around New York.’

  While we were on the subject, I asked Diana why she’d never married again.

  ‘Good Lord, I’d been a wife. I had no desire to be a wife again, nor wash anyone’s bloody socks.’

  She travelled the country alone in a Land Rover, sleeping in the back in places too remote for hotels, learning techniques directly from the matriarchs who passed down their undocumented wisdom. Her books are now considered by many to be the bibles of Mexican cuisine. She is still as fearless as ever. The area where she built her house – around the magnificent ancient tree – is now largely in the control of drug cartels. Diana could have left her small town in this bandit country, where people are kidnapped and murdered. But she lives there alone. She has no intention of leaving her beautiful kitchen gardens surrounded by orchards and filled with rare plants. She has built something that is a testament to her real passion for protection. She takes the past into the present and allows it to exist in the future.

  As she welcomed us, a photographer who had come with me from the US started snapping. Diana offered us tequila as an aperitif. Looking at him sharply, she asked him what he was doing. He shrugged and said he was taking photos.

  ‘Did you ask my permission?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then stop it.’

  To his credit, he put down his camera and apologised. We then went into the garden, where she cooked over fire and in solar ovens. After we had eaten and laid down our linen napkins, she asked him if he might like to take some photographs. The pictures of my tea stored in baskets hanging in her kitchen are among my favourites. I am always filled with huge pride when I see one of my Rare Tea tins in anyone’s kitchen, but for them to be in Diana’s is particularly special.

  The strange German doctor that Diana introduced me to was both a Western doctor and a herbalist. He had a stunning organic farm in the softly rolling hills, close to Diana’s. How he managed the narcos I have no idea. The farm produced some beautiful herbs and I explained that, as I’d travelled through the States on my way to see him, I had used the samples of toronjil he’d sent me to get it listed on the menus of some of America’s most prestigious restaurants.

  The business of kindness is not without its failures. When the doctor heard of the success I had made with his herbs and the orders I had secured, he increased the price by 600 per cent. I bought what I needed, but I never returned. But that’s not to say the trip wasn’t worth it, for the chance to spend time with Diana. Gabriela Cámara, my Mexican chef friend from San Francisco, has since introduced me to some herb farmers involved in a scheme to reinvigorate the pre-Hispanic floating gardens of Xochimilco, just outside Mexico City.

  CHAPTER 28

  CORNWALL, ENGLAND

  I don’t always have to go to such lengths or travel so far to find extraordinary things. There is an ancient botanical garden not far from Truro in Cornwall, England, where they grow some very good herbs. They also grow a little tea. It’s called Tregothnan and the estate has been in the same family since 1334.

  The man who runs it for them is called Jonathon Jones and his mind is as confused and elaborate as mine. When we talk we can never keep on one topic for more than a few seconds without veering off and away into tangents and schemes. I feel as though we are bees industriously buzzing around a garden. Sometimes we settle on the same flower for an instant.

  Jonathon created, for the Boscawen family, the first commercial tea garden in Britain. Not that it hadn’t been tried before, of course. It would have been a neat trick if those first stolen Chinese seedlings brought back by Robert Fortune had thrived, but the terrain and climate of Britain are not well disposed to tea. Tregothnan, however, has a unique microclimate, as the Gulf Stream sweeps round its shores and warms the Cornish coast. Deep inlets snake their way inland, into the estate. Palm trees flourish. Rare plants thrive, and tea now grows on a sloping field leading down to a lake and within an ancient walled garden.

  There isn’t spa
ce for a large plantation and only tiny amounts can be produced. Most of the pure tea available gets blended with Indian leaf. What excites me more is their collection of herbs. For centuries sailing ships made safe harbour in those coastal inlets cutting into the estate. Protected by softly rolling hills, they brought their cargos of exotic plants collected from across the world directly into Tregothnan.

  One of these is manuka from New Zealand. In its home terroir the plant is potent, a relative of the tea-tree family, and mostly far too pungent to make a drink. Instead they collect the precious honey from bees that have feasted on the flowers. In Cornwall, after a few hundred years in an altogether gentler climate, the plants have softened. The evergreen bushes produce small, hardy leaves, soft woody stems and tiny flowers that, when combined, produce an extraordinary tea. There is a hint of cedar and cinnamon over aromatics unlike anything else. Sipped on a cold winter’s night, with a rasping throat and dripping nose, its antibacterial properties come in handy.

  There are few more delicious ways to soothe you, except perhaps chamomile. I used to strongly dislike chamomile tea until I found a Croatian farm. I always thought it dusty and bland, tending to bitter. But the bright blooms from close to the Adriatic Sea were sweet and fragrant. For any chamomile, and I have since found wonderful harvests from across the world, from England to Chile, it’s critical to include the whole flower – stamen, petals and stem – to get the full flavour. Drinking a good chamomile, harvested at the zenith of the summer just as the flowers mature, is like drinking a meadow in full bloom.

  One of my team at Rare Tea made the happy mistake one afternoon of using water at a lower temperature. I’d always put boiling water on herbs to dissolve all the essential oils and bring out the brightest flavours. But chamomile is different. Like tea, it contains bitter compounds, and after too long a steep it can get nasty. But not if you drop the temperature. All the best aromatics dissolve into a lovely soporific infusion at about 70°C.

  CHAMOMILE INFUSION

  I use 2g per 150ml cup of water heated to 70°C, steeping it for one minute. The flowers can be reinfused repeatedly.

  CHAPTER 29

  TARRAGONA, SPAIN

  It looks unpromising when you put five or six tiny dried blossoms into your teapot and hope that these few pale pink flowers will make anything but hot water, but they are packed with flavour. You can collect and dry them yourself, although it’s not easily done. It is the most onerous harvest of anything I have ever encountered.

  It was through these flowers that I met a young farmer called Ferran. I persuaded him to collect the blossom from his grove of Marcona almond trees in Tarragona, northern Spain. At first he was reluctant, and then he tasted them. They make a truly enchanting infusion.

  To get the best flavour, the blossom must be picked at just the right moment, as the first flowers burst from the barren branches, heavy with pollen. The early spring weather in the dry hills of Tarragona, not far from Barcelona, is windy. Great gusts blow the branches and shed the petals into the wind. We have to be quick. There is just a week between the appearance of the first flowers and the point when blossom clouds the tree in full flower. We never know exactly when this will happen and have to be ready, standing by. Almond-tree blossom is almost ethereal. Its flowers are tiny and frailly delicate. These are not the thick petals and heavy flowers of the ornamental cherry. Each tiny bloom must be hand-picked, individually.

  It’s not every day I find myself up a tree. If you had told me I needed to climb up into the mossy boughs, I would have told you I couldn’t. I was never much good at climbing trees, even in my youth. I lack a decent sense of balance (yes, in many ways). I had no intention of climbing Ferran’s trees. But there was a spray of flowers just beyond my reach, so I put a foot in a cleft between two branches and pulled myself up. Another foot on a higher branch and I could reach a few more. Looking down, I realised how high I had come and that I was now looking out over the orchard and the gently breaking foam of blossom.

  Ferran borrowed ladders from a neighbour when we realised we couldn’t safely reach the thinner, outspread branches. He managed to get two, but there were four of us picking. Using a ladder to get us into position, two of us perched in the trees while the other two took the ladders to reach the outer branches. I found myself sitting in the tops of trees, far higher than I could have climbed, with the blue sky above and my legs dangling over gnarled grey branches spotted yellow with lichen. It did seem vaguely ridiculous, but the blossom was in my reach.

  That evening Ferran’s mother and grandmother cooked us dinner in the farmhouse, by the stove. My crude South American Spanish, gleaned without books or teacher during my time living in Bolivia, and cut short by a lightning bolt, was just enough to share stories. They showed me the family album: black-and-white pictures of Ferran’s now frail and bent granny as a strong young woman working the land. We drank the fresh blossom infused in water heated in a pan on the stove and strained through a sieve.

  For the week following the harvest, the flowers are laid out to dry on sheets of muslin in the upstairs rooms of Ferran’s farmhouse, carefully turned so as not to bruise or rot. It was cold that spring and there was the subtlest smoke to the flowers from the wood fire in Ferran’s kitchen stove below. It added to rather than detracted from the flavour and told a more intimate story of the place they were from.

  The flavour is lightly of almonds, with an aroma of marzipan. The taste of honey comes next and then buttery globe artichoke. It’s an odd thing that when you boil an artichoke the water becomes brackish and bitter; you can’t drink it. The artichoke is a flower that doesn’t infuse to deliciousness. But it has found a kindred sister in the almond blossom. If you can imagine the artichoke’s essence, cloak it in butter and honey and place it in the heart of a sweet almond, you can begin to understand this divine infusion. For such tiny, pale flowers, the flavour is remarkably intense. Once the dried blossom hits hot water, it begins to soften and saturate. Soon the wet flowers are floating like pale pink fairies. You could easily find yourself transfixed, holding a glass teapot to the light, watching the flowers, the stamens trembling and the petals softly swaying.

  If you are worrying about the nuts, you needn’t. Many of the trees are old and have stopped producing good-quality almonds. But harvesting the blossom like this can thin the crop to good effect. If a tree produces too many nuts, it will be overburdened, and the nuts will be small and less tasty. Taking a few flowers of early blossom can help the harvest. But it’s a bugger of a job. I know that Ferran finds it a real bind, and it’s at one of his busiest times of year. There is so much for a farmer to do in the spring, so I go and help. Plucking flowers from the fragrant trees in the bright spring sunshine isn’t the worst job I’ve ever done.

  ALMOND BLOSSOM INFUSION

  You need just five or six dried flowers per 150 ml of water heated to boiling point. I infuse them for three to five minutes. You can make up to five infusions – just keep adding more water at the same temperature.

  CHAPTER 30

  GLASTONBURY, SOMERSET, ENGLAND

  My tent had been set up beside a refrigerated van full of chickens. As stallholders, we were able to camp behind our stand, right in the middle of the throng. The fried-chicken man was beside us. We were right by a dance tent and a few minutes’ stagger from the main stage. The refrigerated van keeping the chickens cold wasn’t quiet. Not even for a little bit. Even in the dead of night, when the dance tent had stopped thumping its bass through the ground between us, it roared its refrigerator engines, stopped, then roared them again, over and over. And then there was the sun. We were blessed with brilliant sunshine, no rain and no mud, but in midsummer the sun rises early and a nylon tent becomes a hothouse.

  Sleep didn’t really happen. I lay there wondering what I was doing.

  The people in charge of food and drink at the Glastonbury Festival had invited Rare Tea to come and make good tea. I couldn’t think of a good reason why not. Of course, there
was a stand to build and logistics to work out, including staffing and being in the middle of Somerset for six days. But making leaf tea on that scale didn’t worry me; my team had made five thousand cups of RAF Tea in an hour at the opening of the RAF Memorial in Green Park, for a crowd that included the Queen and all her family. I was feeling pretty cocky. I didn’t realise Glastonbury was 175,000 people. I’d never been.

  Days were a mayhem of making tea for the vast, thirsty crowd, who were taken completely by surprise to find us there. We had a giant banner waving above the stand saying, ‘Rare Tea – Banging Out the Good Stuff’, and we did. In a sea of booze and bottled water, where the only other tea offered came in bags floating in warm water, we were not unpopular.

  My nephew James and his twenty-something friends were there too, and when we closed the tent for the night I went off with them to listen to the music and dance. Glastonbury runs across the vast site all night and into the grey dawn. James would sweetly walk me back to my stall across the cold, dew-damp grass.

  As the quiet army of cleaners moved across the farm, clearing the detritus, lost revellers wandered like zombies. Too strung-out to remember where their tents were in the vastness of the site, these white-faced souls had lost their friends and their wallets and their way. Shivering in sweat-drenched T-shirts, they came like moths to my twinkling lights. It would have been heartless to climb into my sleeping bag and leave them out there. The chicken van roared, and the sun would soon be up. I fired up the urns and made tea. I needed a cup, anyway.