My Cup of Tea

While there’s never a bad time for ice cream, winter is, in all honesty, more conducive to the consumption of warm beverages than frozen confections.  When I lived in Cairo and Beirut, I enjoyed a number of delicious hot, milky drinks that never made it big here in America, presumably because they couldn’t be given a goofy name and sold for $4 without people getting suspicious. In Egypt, a drink of boiled milk with loads of ground cinnamon and sugar, is called ghurfa, Arabic for “cinnamon.” No clever marketing magic there. Bustan, a small, shockingly filthy alleyway café in downtown Cairo, made great ghurfa, as well as a similar concoction made with an unforgiving quantity of ground ginger. It was so spicy it made you wince, but goodness was it addictive. They also did a lovely rendition of sahlep, another milky drink, but this one thickened with dried orchid root, and served with peanuts and raisins mixed in. Imagine a slurpable, piping hot glass of vanilla pudding.

In Beirut, apart from traditional fennel and mint teas, they drink “zohorat”, a lovely tisane made with a mix of flowers, usually including chamomile, rose, linden blossom, verveine, and other plants. Before I left Lebanon, my friend Fouad and his family and I drove to the Chouf mountains where he took me to a fabulous herbalist. There, I picked my own mix of flowers and herbs and left with a big sack of zohorat, as well as bags of fennel, cloves, cinnamon sticks, whole dried ginger root and other spices. 

Back in New York City, where organic soymilk is cheap and abundant, I use these spices to make Indian-style chai, black tea boiled with milk and spices. I’ve given the traditional recipe a New Age twist, by using part soymilk instead of all cow’s milk. Soy milk carries, rather than occludes, the flavor of the spices, and makes an altogether smoother drink, although some cow’s milk can be used for richness. This recipe is very loose, and can be modified according to which flavors you adore or despise in your tea.

Here's the recipe.