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Camomile Tea
And one of the most pleasant flower teas is grandmotherly camomile, which has persisted in rural Europe since the Middle Ages and can be found growing wild in many places escaped from some ancient herb patch, even as we come across it in New England. The amber color of camomile tea disappears when lemon is added, so we put in a few drops of orange flower water instead.
Bundles of sassafras bark peeled from the roots are still sold in some parts to make the sassafras tea that used to be considered indispensable for tiding one over the lassitude of the late winter weeks a very pleasant drink to brew outdoors, too, exactly as we inherited it from the Indians. Another strictly American beverage is sweet potato leaf tea, once again in common use in the South because of the depression.
The same brewing rules apply to all of these: if the herb or mixture of herbs is dried, use about a teaspoonful for each cup, and much more if fresh. Use only enamel or china pot for brewing, cover closely, don't steep too long, and drink plenty hot, with honey-the most natural and outdoorsy sweetener.
As for regular grocery store teas, a fancy kind called Lapsang Soochang is specially suited to outdoor brewing. It has a smoky flavor that goes well with anything you cabob or coddle along over a camp fire. And to make your ordinary garden party Ceylons or Oolong more interesting and flavorsome, try dropping into the cups fresh leaves from forest, field or garden-sassafras, for instance, any kind of mint, balm, nasturtium leaves, lemon verbena and such.
This is a general method for herb teas rather than a fixed formula: one teaspoon of dried herb per cup, more if fresh, in a non-reactive pot. A few of the plants named have not aged as well as the technique.
- The proportionA teaspoon of dried chamomile flowers per cup suits the loose whole blossoms, which are very light; if you weigh, that is only a gram or so. The book does not quantify "much more if fresh"; two or three times the volume is the usual rule of thumb, since fresh flowers are mostly water.
- Steeping time is the hingeChamomile can turn bitter and faintly medicinal with long steeping, which is what the book's "don't steep too long" is guarding against; four or five minutes covered is a common working range. The instruction to cover closely is not fussiness: the aromatic oils leave with the steam.
- The potEnamel or china was specified because bare iron, aluminium and unlined copper react with tannins and plant acids, dulling the colour and the flavour. Glass, stainless steel and modern enamelware all qualify; a cast-iron kettle used bare does not.
- SassafrasSassafras root bark contains safrole, which the FDA barred as a food additive in 1960 on evidence of liver toxicity and carcinogenicity in animals. Bark sold today for tea is generally labelled safrole-free; traditional root bark peeled and brewed at home is not something to make now.
- Sweet potato leaf teaThe leaves are edible and are still eaten as a green across West Africa and Southeast Asia. The reference to "the depression" dates the book to the 1930s, when the leaves were free and coffee was not.
- Lapsang SouchongSpelled Lapsang Souchong today, a Fujian black tea dried over pinewood smoke. It is strong stuff outdoors; use slightly less leaf than you would for an ordinary black tea and no more than three minutes, or the smoke turns to tar.
- Orange flower waterSold with baking supplies or in Middle Eastern groceries. A few drops is literal - it is potent, and more than three or four in a cup will taste like soap.
- One caveat on chamomileIt is in the daisy family, and people with strong ragweed or aster allergies occasionally react to it. Worth knowing before you brew a pot for a crowd.
Chamomile - German chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla, and its perennial cousin Roman chamomile - was a fixture of European physic gardens long before it was a bedtime drink, and it did escape cultivation widely, turning up along roadsides and in waste ground on both sides of the Atlantic. The author's grouping of it with sassafras and sweet potato leaves is characteristic of American camp cookery between the wars, when foraged and improvised drinks carried both a frontier romance and, by the 1930s, a real economy. Sassafras tea was indeed learned by European colonists from Native peoples of the eastern woodlands, and sassafras root was one of the first commercial exports out of the Virginia and New England colonies, shipped to Europe as a supposed cure for a range of ailments; the spring tonic tradition described here is the long domestic tail of that trade.