Belimal Flower Tea (Dried Bael Blossom)

Description

Belimal is the dried flower of the bael tree (Aegle marmelos), and the tea it makes is warm, gently sweet and quietly fragrant. The blossoms are gathered when they drop, dried whole, and steeped a spoonful at a time. It is the herbal pot that comes out in most Sri Lankan homes when the weather turns.

The bael tree gives two things to a Sri Lankan kitchen. The fruit, beli, is heavy and hard-shelled and gets pulped into a drink. The flower, belimal, is small and cream-coloured and gets dried for tea.

The smell is the giveaway. Open a pouch of good belimal and it is honeyed and faintly resinous, more like a warm spice than a flower. That scent carries straight into the cup and is most of what people are after.

In practice this is the household tea for a cold evening or a scratchy throat, brewed strong, sweetened with a little kithul treacle, and drunk hot. Tradition, again, rather than a promise about what it does.

How to Use

• Steep a teaspoon for 5 to 7 minutes and drink it hot
• Sweeten with a spoon of kithul treacle
• Brew with a bruised piece of ginger
• Make a pot in the evening, it has no caffeine in it

Cook with It

• belimal tea, brewed the way it is at home
• kithul treacle, the usual sweetener for it
• ranawara flower tea, the afternoon pot

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