Tweet
Re: Tea Rations?
Mint tea is very refreshing and a well known beverage in Morocco but there is a catch. I started looking in primary sources for mentions of mint tea for our time period. The only ones I could find were in reference to medicinal purposes. The flavor of the mint disguised the taste of less desirable flavors in other medicines. Mint also has medicinal qualities of its own.
If you want to use mint tea as a medicine as part of your impression but if you are just drinking a cup of mint tea or black tea with mint leaves in it, that would be considered incorrect. It is very easy to place our 21st century tastes and logic into the 19th century but oftentimes it doesn't work. What makes sense to us doesn't always work and we must dig a little deeper to find out the actual 19th century use of an item or food.
A great many teas were made for medicinal purposes - blackberry roots boiled in water for diarrhea, flaxseed tea was an emetic, Valerian tea for hysteria, spicebush tea for pneumonia, and the list goes on. There were some substitutes listed for tea when it became scarce - holly leaves, yaupon leaves, New Jersey tea, blackberry leaves, sassafras root tea, but I did not see that mint was used a tea substitute. I may have missed something so if anyone has some a primary source for mint tea that was not used as a medicine, please let me know. I don't want to lead anyone astray with incorrect information.
Originally posted by PogueMahone
View Post
Mint tea is very refreshing and a well known beverage in Morocco but there is a catch. I started looking in primary sources for mentions of mint tea for our time period. The only ones I could find were in reference to medicinal purposes. The flavor of the mint disguised the taste of less desirable flavors in other medicines. Mint also has medicinal qualities of its own.
If you want to use mint tea as a medicine as part of your impression but if you are just drinking a cup of mint tea or black tea with mint leaves in it, that would be considered incorrect. It is very easy to place our 21st century tastes and logic into the 19th century but oftentimes it doesn't work. What makes sense to us doesn't always work and we must dig a little deeper to find out the actual 19th century use of an item or food.
A great many teas were made for medicinal purposes - blackberry roots boiled in water for diarrhea, flaxseed tea was an emetic, Valerian tea for hysteria, spicebush tea for pneumonia, and the list goes on. There were some substitutes listed for tea when it became scarce - holly leaves, yaupon leaves, New Jersey tea, blackberry leaves, sassafras root tea, but I did not see that mint was used a tea substitute. I may have missed something so if anyone has some a primary source for mint tea that was not used as a medicine, please let me know. I don't want to lead anyone astray with incorrect information.
Comment