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Violet Tea
This is a soothing beverage for persons suffering from bronchitis and similar affections. Put a tea-spoonful of dried violets in a jar, and pour upon them half a pint of boiling water. Let them infuse for five minutes, strain the liquor, sweeten with honey, and it will be fit for use.
A single-cup herbal infusion, and about as simple as a recipe gets. The only things worth pinning down are the volume, the flower, and the steeping time.
- Half a pintIn a British book of this period that is an Imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. It makes one generous mug, not two.
- Which violetSweet violet, Viola odorata, is the plant meant, and its dried flowers are what you want. The African violet (Saintpaulia) sold as a houseplant is an unrelated genus and is not used in food or drink.
- Sourcing the flowersDried sweet violet flowers are sold by herb suppliers, sometimes as violet petals for baking and cocktails. Buy from a food-grade seller rather than a florist or garden centre, where blooms are routinely treated with pesticides.
- A teaspoonfulDried whole violet flowers are very light and bulky. A level teaspoon of them is a small amount by weight, roughly a gram; if your petals are crumbled rather than whole, use a scant teaspoon or the infusion turns grassy.
- Warm the jarInfusing in a jar rather than an open cup helps retain heat and keeps the volatile aromatics in the liquid. The recipe does not specify a covering, but rinsing the vessel with boiling water first and setting a lid or saucer on it while it steeps will do no harm.
- Five minutes, no longerViolet gives up its scent and its blue-violet colour quickly, and a longer steep is generally held to draw out a more mucilaginous, faintly bitter edge. Strain when the five minutes are up, as directed.
- Honey lastStir the honey in after straining, once the liquid has stopped steaming hard. Honey added to water at a rolling boil loses much of its aroma, which is half of what it contributes here.
- On the medical claimThe book offers this as a remedy for bronchitis. Treat it as a pleasant warm drink; it is not a treatment, and honey should never be given to a child under one year old.
Sweet violet was a standard item in the nineteenth-century domestic medicine chest as much as the kitchen, and pharmacopoeias of the era list syrup of violets alongside its use as a chemical indicator, since the blue pigment turns red with acid and green with alkali. The flower's reputation as a demulcent for coughs and chest complaints is old and traditional rather than clinically established, and it rests on the mucilage in the plant, which coats and soothes a raw throat much as marshmallow root or slippery elm were said to. Nineteenth-century household cookery books were commonly expected to cover the sickroom as well as the table: gruels, beef teas, barley waters and flower infusions all sat within the cook's remit. Violets were also a commercial crop in Victorian Britain, grown around Devon and in the south of France for the perfume and confectionery trades.