Ingredients
Check off as you cook.
Method
- Rinse the leaves and bruise them lightly with the back of a spoon.
- Pour the hot water over the leaves, cover, and steep 10 minutes. Cover it: the wintergreen note is a volatile oil — the same property that let the old mountain distillers carry it off in steam.
- Strain, sweeten to taste, and drink hot — with a little milk or cream if you want it the way country families once took it. A few crushed berries steeped with the leaves add an aromatic sweetness of their own.
Sources
The Pottsville Republican urged "the revival of the old time teaberry tea of grandmother's days" in 1920 but printed no recipe, and the claims it made for the drink were the paper's own. The quantities and the method here are ours; the chemistry and the cautions in the safety note come from the sources below.
- Pottsville Republican, August 21, 1920, p. 4 — a call for "the revival of the old time teaberry tea of grandmother's days" (the health claims are the paper's, not ours), via Newspapers.com · 1920-08-21 License: publisher
- Online Etymology Dictionary — "teaberry" (1818), from tea + berry, "so called because the dried berries were used as a substitute for tea or to flavor it" License: reference
- William P. C. Barton, M.D., Vegetable Materia Medica of the United States, or Medical Botany (1817–18), "Gaultheria Procumbens. Mountain-Tea. Tea-Berry." — the leaf-tea practice: "during the American revolution, when China tea was scarce, or not procurable, it was a common practice to make a tea of the recent or dried leaves of the Gaultheria," which "after being sweetened with sugar and softened with milk or cream, it was drank by many families at breakfast and supper, in lieu of common tea or coffee"; the berries "exceedingly aromatic and grateful to the taste," via Henriette's Herbal Homepage · 1818 License: public-domain
- PubChem (NIH National Library of Medicine), Methyl Salicylate, CID 4133 — the salicylate toxicity behind the safety note: "as little as 4 mL (4.7 g) of methyl salicylate may be fatal in children"; "a common pediatric poison"; poisoning symptoms "differ little from those described for aspirin" License: public-domain
- King's American Dispensatory (1898), Oleum Betulae (oil of birch) — the entry that also covers oil of wintergreen: the Gaultheria oil "contains about 99 per cent of methyl salicylate," and both are volatile oils taken off by distillation, via Henriette's Herbal Homepage · 1898 License: public-domain
Coal Region recipes · schuylkillhub.com/food/recipes/teaberry-tea