Thursday, June 16, 2005

Thé a la menthe

Another amazing, and sweet, moroccan drink is the mint tea. When i first read guidebooks on morocco, one of the common themes was that social interactions were built around tea. If somebody visits you, or if you even do business with someone, there is normally mint tea involved... It's basically brewed green tea with a large amount of mint leaves and a generous helping of sugar, served hot. It tastes pretty damn good, and the mint leaves (which you can buy in bulk at many stores), give it a
fresh kick.
There's a quasi-ceremony that accompanies the serving of mint tea. First off, you drink the tea in small glasses, normally with moroccan designs etched on them, served from a small teapot where the tea was brewed. The technical part comes in pretty quickly: after pouring a small amount of mint tea into a glass, you put the tea back into the pot to mix up the tea and keep all the parts equal, so the sugar doesn't fall to the bottom of the pot before you even serve it. After doing that, you pour glasses of tea from ridiculously high heights. I've seen moroccan people that do it 2 feet in the air, or more - and considering that the glasses are nothing huge, it's quite the feat. Additionally, the goal is to do it without splashing any of the hot tea on the guests, so it takes a fair amount of practice.

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