Traditional use

By plant

• Cardamom: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The pod that defines two entirely different drinks: masala chai in South Asia and gahwa in the Gulf. In the second, cardamom is not an accent — it is present in quantities that make the coffee taste principally of cardamom, which is the intention.

• Chamomile: traditional use

  4 traditions

  The most widely drunk flower infusion in the world, and one whose traditions are far less uniform than the supermarket shelf suggests. Four practices are recorded here — European household, European written herbal, Egyptian and Levantine, and Latin American — and they differ in what they are made from, when they are drunk and what each says it is for.

• Chrysanthemum: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The most-drunk flower infusion in China, taken within a classificatory system that sorts foods and drinks by warming and cooling character — a framework that has no direct English equivalent and is routinely mistranslated into the vocabulary of Western nutrition.

• Cinnamon: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A bark whose traditions are clear and whose identity is not. Most of what is sold as cinnamon in North America is cassia, a different species of the same genus, and almost every tradition described in English-language writing has to be read twice to work out which bark it is about.

• Elderflower: traditional use

  2 traditions

  A hedgerow flower with a two-week season and two opposite drinking traditions off the same tree in the same fortnight: preserved in sugar and drunk cold all summer in Britain and Scandinavia, dried and drunk hot in winter across central Europe.

• Fennel: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A seed with two quite separate places at a meal: crushed into an infusion afterwards in southern Europe, and eaten dry by the spoonful afterwards in India. The second is not a drink at all, which is why an account that only covers infusions misses most of the plant's use.

• Ginger: traditional use

  4 traditions

  A rhizome traded out of Southeast Asia early enough to have separate, independently developed traditions at both ends of the old spice routes. The preparations differ more than the plant does: a decoction of the fresh root, a slice in hot water, a dried powder in a spiced infusion and a syrup are four different drinks.

• Hibiscus: traditional use

  4 traditions

  One plant, four names and four national drinks: karkadé in Egypt and Sudan, bissap in Senegal and the Sahel, agua de Jamaica in Mexico, and sorrel in the Caribbean. In every one of them it is drunk cold and sweet in quantity, which is not how the European tea aisle presents it.

• Jujube: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A dried red date used across China, Korea and the Levant, and one of the few botanicals in this catalogue that is a food first and an infusion second. In Chinese practice it appears in a pair with ginger often enough that the two function as a single preparation.

• Lavender: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A plant whose traditional use is overwhelmingly not drinking. Lavender's long European history is in linen, in scent, in distilled oil and in the bath; the infusion is a comparatively recent and largely commercial arrival, and the tradition it is sold on belongs to the smell rather than to the cup.

• Lemon balm: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A garden plant far better known than the product made from it. Lemon balm is drunk across Europe overwhelmingly from the garden rather than from a packet, which is why it is a familiar household plant and a minor commercial one.

• Lemongrass: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A grass that is a kitchen ingredient across Southeast Asia and a drink across the Caribbean, West Africa and Brazil. The two uses are separated by whether the stalk or the leaf is used, and English-language writing routinely conflates them.

• Linden: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The European evening infusion that is ordered by name in cafés, gathered from street trees in June, and known by a different word in every country it is drunk in. Tilleul, ıhlamur and tila are the same flower.

• Liquorice root: traditional use

  4 traditions

  A root used across four traditions for two quite different reasons — as a sweetener that carries other flavours, and as a component of formulae in its own right — and the commonest ingredient a drinker consumes without knowing it, because it is very often unnamed on the front of a blend.

• Nettle: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A plant of scarcity before it was a plant of wellness. Nettle's European tradition is a spring-gathering and hungry-gap tradition — the first green thing available after winter — and it is a food tradition at least as much as a drinking one.

• Peppermint: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A plant with a very short history and a very large reputation. Peppermint is a sterile hybrid first recorded in England in the seventeenth century, so every tradition attached to it is younger than that — and several of the traditions credited to it in English-language writing actually belong to spearmint.

• Rooibos: traditional use

  2 traditions

  A plant that grows wild in one mountain range on earth and nowhere else, whose drinking tradition is a South African one, and whose worldwide presence rests almost entirely on a single compositional fact: it is not Camellia sinensis and contains no caffeine.

• Rosehip: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The fruit of the wild rose, gathered after the first frost, and the subject of one of the best-documented state collection campaigns in the history of any botanical: British schoolchildren picked rosehips by the ton during the Second World War for a nationally distributed syrup.

• Sage: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A plant that northern Europe cooks with and the eastern Mediterranean drinks. Sage tea is an ordinary everyday infusion across Turkey, Greece and the Levant and is almost unknown as a drink in Britain, which is why English-language writing about it is mostly about stuffing.

• Spearmint: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The mint of the Maghreb, the Levant and Turkey, and the plant that most of the world's mint-drinking tradition actually belongs to. Its most visible form — Moroccan mint tea — is younger than either of its components and is a hospitality institution rather than a beverage choice.

• Thyme: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A Mediterranean shrub drunk as an infusion across the Levant and southern Europe and used as a cooking herb everywhere else. Its most culturally loaded form is not a drink at all: za'atar is both the Arabic name of the plant and the name of the spice mixture built on it.

• Tulsi: traditional use

  2 traditions

  A plant whose primary traditional context is religious rather than culinary. Tulsi is grown in Hindu households as a sacred plant, kept in a dedicated pot by the door and tended daily, and its use as a drink sits inside that context rather than beside it.

• Turmeric: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A rhizome with a very long South Asian history as a food, a dye and a ceremonial substance, and a very short Western history as a drink. The 'golden latte' is a twenty-first-century café product that names a South Asian preparation it only partly resembles.

• Valerian: traditional use

  3 traditions

  The most visible bedtime botanical with the least drinking tradition behind it. Valerian root is a pharmacy plant rather than a household one: it has a long written European record and almost no place in any culture's ordinary hot-drink repertoire, which is unusual for something this prominent on the shelf.

• Yaupon: traditional use

  4 traditions

  North America's only native caffeinated plant, central to the ceremonial life of the Indigenous nations of the southeast, and saddled with a scientific name — Ilex vomitoria — given by a European botanist who misread what he was told about the ceremony. The name has outlasted the error by three centuries.

• Yerba mate: traditional use

  3 traditions

  A caffeinated South American holly whose traditional practice is defined less by the plant than by the vessel and the sharing: one gourd, one metal straw, refilled and passed around a group in a fixed order by a designated server.