Egyptian aniseed infusion drunk scalding hot with honey, the household remedy of the Nile
Origin: Cairo & the Nile Delta, Egypt
From the journey of Anise.
Anise enters the written record in Egypt, and it enters it as medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, compiled in about 1550 BCE and the fullest Egyptian medical text to survive, lists the seed amongst its remedies for the stomach and the chest, and the Delta has grown it ever since; Egypt is still one of the largest exporters of anise seed in the world. What is remarkable is that the use has never changed. Yansoon is nothing more than anise seed steeped in boiling water, sweetened, and drunk very hot, and it is what an Egyptian household reaches for against a cough, a chest cold, a colicky baby, or a dinner that has been overdone. It is sold from the same glass cabinets as tea and karkadeh, it costs almost nothing, and it belongs to a family of restorative infusions that includes helba made with fenugreek and irfa made with cinnamon. In a Cairo café the order is understood without explanation: somebody drinking yansoon is either unwell or has eaten too much. The reason it works is now understood. Anethole, which makes up the overwhelming majority of the oil in the seed, is a carminative that relaxes the smooth muscle of the gut, and it is mildly antispasmodic. The other traditional claim is that anise encourages a nursing mother's milk, a belief held right across the Mediterranean and the Near East, and here too there is something in it: anethole has a weak oestrogenic action. Egyptian families serve sweet anise drinks at the subūʿ, the celebration held on the seventh day after a birth, when the newborn is named and carried through the house. The technique is trivial and the details are not. The seed must be lightly bruised, never ground, or the infusion turns cloudy and bitter; the water must be just off the boil rather than furiously boiling; and the glass must be covered whilst it steeps, because everything worth having in anise is volatile and will otherwise leave with the steam. Honey goes in at the end, off the heat, for the same reason it always should.
For an infant with colic the traditional preparation is much weaker, roughly a quarter of the seed to the same water, unsweetened, and cooled to blood heat; a teaspoon or two is given. Modern paediatric advice is to be cautious with herbal infusions for very young babies, and commercial anise teas have occasionally been found adulterated with star anise of the wrong species, so this is a place to use whole seed of known provenance. A Levantine version adds a small piece of cinnamon bark and a few pine nuts left in the glass to be eaten at the end. In the Maghreb the same infusion is made with a mixture of anise and fennel. Anise seed also goes into helba, the fenugreek drink, where it softens the bitterness considerably.
Mapping Culinary History
To explore — select an ingredient below.
To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.
Journey Point Map Key