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Yerba Mate

For instance, delicious and refreshing yerba maté, commonly abbreviated to just yerba, or plain "herb," is drunk all over Latin America, where Chinese and Indian teas are frequently considered mere remedies for headache. The leaves, which come from a shrub of the holly family found wild in southern Brazil, Paraguay, and a corner of Argentina, are dried in smoke and packaged according to grades and types under various trade-marks; and German-Brazilian colonists export shiploads to their homeland where they're flavored with rum, brandy, or kummel. During the Victorian era yerba had a brief inning in England and hence appears under the name of Paraguay tea at the afternoon parties of the Cranford ladies and other fiction characters in novels of the period. Now it is due for a revival, anywav outdoors since it started out as a South American campfire drink that stays hunger, is more innocuous than either oriental tea or occidental coffee; it's easy to carry, a cinch to prepare, and hikers say it gives them energy. Many fancy groceries and department stores stock it and even maté gourds and bombillas (silver-plated tubes with bulbous strainers on the ends), from which South Americans sip their Paraguay tea, can be bought at herb shops and Spanish stores. Packages carry directions for brewing, but sometimes omit the suggestion of a slice of lemon or orange, or a piece of kumquat rind, for additional piquancy. You can get it with leaves either crushed coarsely with some of the stems in the style called cowboy, Gaucho (which we like best) or ground more finely for better grades.

It is not made in a pot like oriental tea, but in a gourd or mate the size of your fist and often beautifully decorated, mounted in silver. There's a small hole in the top or stem end of the gourd through which about 2 heaping teaspoons of the crushed leaves are poured, together with sugar to taste (or none), and often that half fills the gourd, then hot water, but not boiling hot. You hold it in your hand while it seeps a little, then insert the silver tube called bombilla and suck as you would cider through a straw. The bombilla stem is the size of a straw and has a hollow ball at the end that rests in the bottom of the maté gourd; it's pierced with fine holes so none of the herb (yerba) will be sucked up which makes you splutter, and spoils the drink. Maté fanciers are so fond of this little pump (bombilla) and gourd (maté) outfit that they collect beautifully decorated antique ones, sometimes made of gold, and the hard egg shell of the Argentine rhea is often mounted to serve as a maté cup, usually with tripod legs to rest it on, although most yerba gourds cannot be set down and have to be held cupped in the hands, which helps to warm things up on chilly mornings around the campfire, where, when maté kits are scarce, a single one will be passed from hand to hand and lip to lip, like a peace pipe.