Ingredients
Instructions
- Look inside a hip for the fine hairs packed around the seeds. They are a genuine irritant; a commercially dried hip has usually had them cleaned out and a home-dried one usually has not.
- Break the hips open between finger and thumb before they go anywhere near water. Left whole, that leathery skin keeps nearly everything inside and you get a pale, thin cup.
- Lay the chamomile on top of the hips rather than mixing the two. The flowers give up everything they have in a few minutes while the hips need the full quarter hour.
- Add the boiling water and cover it. Chamomile scent is volatile and a lid is the only thing keeping it in the pot rather than in the room.
- Strain through a paper filter or a doubled square of muslin instead of a basket. This is the step that catches any seed hairs, and a wire mesh will pass them straight through.
- Taste it before sweetening anything. Hips vary enormously season to season — some batches want nothing at all and some are sour enough to set your jaw.
- Keep the hips and the flowers in separate jars in the dark, and work through them within a year. Hips hold their colour far longer than chamomile holds its scent, and a flower that smells of hay has nothing left to give.
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