Herb tea seasoning
Herb tea is weird; it probably came from desperation. What can I do with this plant that is otherwise not edible? All I have is water and wood. Maybe I can boil it and at least the water will have some flavor… From there came all the glorious uses of boiling things: beverage, soup, broth, scented air, cleansing, inhaling hot wet air to clear the lungs.
My parents didn’t serve tea or coffee; there was in mom’s cupboard an antique container of Postum. Taking cooking as a 4-H class opened my eyes to ingredients; my sister and I explored Mom’s cupboards thoroughly. We already knew where the chocolate chips lived, in the back of the very top shelf, up against the ceiling. My five-foot-two mother had two stepstools. We just hitched ourselves up onto the counter. There were canning jars and lids, paraffin for sealing jam jars, waxed paper, butcher paper in a huge roll, various pots and pans, baking dishes, a punch bowl, glass cups with handles and matching dessert plates in a decorative almost-oval shape. We didn’t bother to get into the china closet; it had glass windows in the door. Besides, while we had to be careful with glass casserole dishes, it never occurred to me to touch Mom’s delicate china. It was gorgeous, gold rimmed with roses on white. My older siblings and Mom hand washed and dried it on holidays.
There was not much food in the kitchen cupboards; mice were an issue my mother did not want. Next to the chocolate was a bag of dry, fossilized marshmallows, a bag of cinnamon red hots candy, and a tightly closed container of sugared fruits for fruit cake. We tried the red hots a few times; they were too hot to eat many, and too hard. The marshmallows had fossilized into one lump, impossible to separate. Once in a blue moon we’d try the sugared fruit; it always made me wince. The concentrated sugar couldn’t cover the bitterness, a flavor I now attribute to red food coloring.
My mother had a large collection of spices, almost all of them old by the time I investigated them. My mother only used them when a recipe called for them, which was not often. Garlic, salt, and pepper were my dad’s go to seasonings, until in my teens he discovered he could bottle his own salsa. After that we had salsa all the time.
I decided I wanted to know what spices tasted like. Allspice balls, the little corns you use in mulled cider, made a good beverage. Maybe the others would, too. So I went through my mom’s entire spice rack, making one cup of herb tea from each spice or seasoning. I skipped garlic and dried onion; I already knew those. Cinnamon I also knew. I don’t think I used chili powder, but I tried all the lesser known components individually. And now I know. Turns out cumin makes terrible herb tea.
