Moorish honey and fresh mint cooling drink from Al-Andalus
Origin: Córdoba, Moorish Al-Andalus
From the journey of Mint.
The cooling drink tradition of Moorish Al-Andalus drew directly on the Persian and Abbasid court culture that had shaped Islamic culinary practice since the 9th century. The word julab, from which English 'julep' descends, comes from the Arabic-Persian gulab (rose water), naming a category of sweetened, aromatic, chilled syrups designed specifically for the hot months of the Andalusian summer. The 13th-century Andalusian cookbook known as the Manuscrito Anónimo documents several versions of these cooling drinks, combining honey, lemon, and aromatic herbs or flower waters in proportions very similar to those used here. Spearmint (na'nā) was the prestige herb of the Moorish palatine garden tradition: Ibn al-Awwam's 12th-century agricultural treatise Kitab al-Filaha devotes specific attention to its cultivation in Andalusian soils, and mint beds were maintained in the gardens of the Alhambra and the Generalife. When the Moorish kingdoms fell and Castilian colonists carried their kitchen traditions across the Atlantic to New Granada, they carried the name hierba buena (good herb, their Castilian name for spearmint) with them, and the honey-mint-lemon drink tradition was replanted in the Andean highlands as agua de panela con hierbabuena, which remains one of Colombia's most universally drunk daily beverages to this day. The word julep meanwhile continued its own journey: from Arabic julab to Spanish julepe to English julep, finally arriving in the frosted silver cups of the Kentucky Bluegrass as the mint julep of the American South.
The floral water is the element that most clearly identifies this drink with its Moorish origins and distinguishes it from a simple mint lemonade, and it should not be omitted. Rose water and orange blossom water are interchangeable here and both are historically correct: the Andalusi still-rooms distilled ma' ward and ma' zahr alike and used them in the same preparations, and the thirteenth-century Andalusian recipes for these cooling drinks call for one or the other according to what was to hand. Rose is given first because it is the older of the two and because the drink's whole lineage runs through it, the Arabic julab that gave English 'julep' being nothing but the Persian gulab, rose water. Orange blossom is the more common survival in modern Moroccan and southern Spanish practice, and a half-and-half combination is very good indeed. What should not be substituted is a syrup or an essence in place of a distilled water. The drink keeps refrigerated for up to 24 hours, though the mint character fades and the floral water softens on standing; it is at its best freshly strained and served immediately over ice.
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