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Dandelion Tea
Pick dandelions from the stems, and pour over boiling water. Simmer, but do not boil, for five minutes. Strain through a sieve, and sweeten to taste. Serve either hot or cold.
A four-line recipe with no quantities, so the proportions are yours to set. Everything else hinges on how you handle the flowers before the water goes on.
- What to pick"Pick dandelions from the stems" means the flower heads only, pulled free of the hollow stalk, which bleeds a bitter white latex. Roughly two cups of loosely packed heads to a quart of water gives a tea with noticeable flavour; less than that and you have faintly sweet hot water.
- Where to pickGather only from ground you know has not been sprayed with herbicide or fertiliser, and stay well back from roadsides and dog-walking paths. Selective lawn herbicides post-date this book, so that much at least is a precaution the modern reader has to add for herself.
- Trim the greenThe green bracts at the base of each head carry most of the bitterness. Pinching the yellow petals away from the green base is tedious but it is the difference between a floral infusion and something closer to bitter greens.
- Simmer, do not boilThe distinction seems to be doing real work: a hard boil is likely to drive off the light honeyed aroma and to draw bitterness from any green matter left in. Hold the water barely trembling, well short of a rolling boil, for the five minutes.
- Five minutes is shortPetals give up their flavour quickly, and this is a pale, delicate drink rather than a strong one. If you want more body, add more flowers rather than more time.
- SweeteningHoney suits it better than sugar and echoes the flower's own scent. Add it off the heat, after straining, so you can judge the strength of the infusion first.
- Straining and yieldA fine sieve catches the petals; a second pass through muslin removes the pollen haze if you want a clear cup. A quart of water and two cups of heads makes four small servings, hot, or a jug to chill with lemon.
- Not medicinePeriod books treat dandelion as a spring tonic for the liver and blood. Treat it as a pleasant infusion; anyone on diuretics or with a ragweed-family allergy should be cautious, since dandelion is in the same family.
Dandelion has a long double life in American kitchens: the leaves as an early spring green, the roots roasted as a coffee substitute, and the flowers as the base of dandelion wine, often said to have been a common farmhouse ferment in the nineteenth century. That last connection is why a tea like this belongs in a temperance collection. Books published under titles like On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon set out to prove that a household could entertain, warm a guest and mark an occasion without alcohol, and they worked partly by taking familiar alcoholic drinks and offering a dry version under a near-identical name. A cup of sweetened dandelion infusion is dandelion wine with the fermentation left out. The argument is plain enough: the fruit and the flower were fine, it was the waiting that had to go.