Lemon Verbena Tea
I serve this at the end of just about every meal beginning in early summer, when our verbena plants… leaf out.
Ingredients
- 12 fresh large lemon verbena leaves
- 1 T sugar
- 4 cups boiling water
Instructions
- Steep leaves in boiling water. Add sugar to taste.
Notes
When I was in my mid-20s, I fought a long, messy and entirely internal struggle over whether to move to Israel.
Many young Jews living in the Diaspora — more than you think — face this choice. We spend some time there, either as part of an organized program, or, as I did, on our own. Then we have to choose.
Israel, small as it is, exerts a strong pull.
I was 25 in 1985. I had lived in Israel for a year; worked hard to learn Hebrew, find a job and an apartment; built the beginnings of a life. I had a girlfriend, Miki, and a group of Israeli friends — Jews, Arabs, South Africans, French, Australians, Angelenos — whose company inspired me. We worked or went to school, then spent the evenings visiting, drinking really bad Carmel Hock wine or powdered Turkish coffee, arguing, laughing, dreaming.
None of us had money, and the country itself was simple and poor compared to the States: no cell phones, two brands of beer, two TV channels.
Maybe it’s the same with all 25-year-olds. At that age, you enter a kind of second childhood, you sponge up whatever culture you happen to find yourself in. I have friends from Encino who spent those post-college years in London and returned with full-on English accents, never quite able to lose them.
In any case, Israel felt like my new home, and I wrestled with whether I could separate myself from my family and make a career there.
Because I tend to relate to the world through food, my memories of those years are tied to foods I discovered for the first time there. One day, Miki and I befriended an elderly man named S.E. Yardeni, who lived in a simple home on a relatively large plot of land in Jerusalem. Yardeni was a pioneer who had come to settle the land. His agile mind invented the locks that still bear his name. He founded his company in 1947, a year before statehood, and by the time we met him, he was retired and devoting himself to his garden. He had the money to live anywhere in the world, in style, but he was rooted, like his fig, olive and pomegranate trees, to the land.
One hot summer day, he showed us how he made pomegranate wine. It was served cold and was mildly alcoholic, the color of rubies. To this day, I’ve never tasted anything quite so perfect. He made us a salad of the lettuce and tomatoes he grew, and he poured tea for us that was unlike any I’d ever tasted: sweet, lemony, minty.
