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SAFFRON TEA (to assist digestion)
Mix a pinch of saffron with a quarter of a pint of hot water. Let it infuse for ten minutes, then add two or three table-spoonfuls of brandy or any other spirit and a lump of sugar. Serve hot or cold. Time, ten minutes.
A single cup of medicinal saffron infusion, spiked. It works as written, but the proportions need translating and the saffron needs a word of caution about quantity.
- A quarter of a pintIn a British book this is 5 fl oz, or a generous half cup. It makes one small cupful once the spirit is added.
- A pinch of saffronRead this as 10 to 15 threads, no more. Saffron is assertive and bitter in excess; a heaped pinch will taste metallic and medicinal rather than floral.
- Water temperatureUse water just off the boil rather than at a rolling boil. Saffron gives up its colour and aroma readily in hot water, and ten minutes covered is ample to draw a deep orange infusion.
- Crush or notThreads left whole release colour more slowly than threads crushed between the fingers or ground with the sugar. If you want full colour in the stated ten minutes, crush them first.
- Two or three tablespoonfuls of spiritThat is 1 to 1.5 fl oz of brandy in a 5 fl oz cup, so roughly a fifth to a quarter of the drink by volume. Substantially stronger than the word "tea" suggests, and a reason this was dosed by the cupful.
- The lump of sugarLumps were nipped from a sugar loaf and varied in size; a teaspoon of granulated sugar is a reasonable modern stand-in. Add it to the hot infusion before the spirit so it dissolves fully.
- Serving coldIf served cold, it is worth straining out the threads before chilling, as the infusion will keep darkening and may take on a bitter edge. Yield is one cup.
This is invalid cookery: the branch of Victorian domestic practice that sat on the border between the kitchen and the sickroom, alongside beef tea, barley water and arrowroot gruel. Saffron had carried a reputation as a stomachic and stimulant since the classical and medieval herbalists, and it survived in English domestic medicine long after physicians had lost interest, which is why a nineteenth-century cookery dictionary can offer it with the parenthesis "to assist digestion" and no further argument. The brandy is doing much of the work here; hot spirits were a common vehicle for what was given to a patient, and the pattern of a hot infusion, sugar and a measure of liquor is the same one behind the Victorian toddy and posset. Saffron itself was expensive but not exotic in Britain, having been grown around Saffron Walden in Essex into the eighteenth century, and it persisted longest in Cornish baking, where saffron cake is still made.