Mint Tea

Mint tea, as understood in Morocco and the wider Maghreb, is green tea, typically gunpowder green tea, brewed strong and sweet with fresh spearmint leaves and a generous amount of sugar, traditionally poured from a height into small glasses to aerate it and raise a light foam. Tea itself was a rare luxury in Morocco before the middle of the nineteenth century; a popular account holds that British merchants, left holding warehouses of green tea intended for Baltic markets closed off by the Crimean War of the 1850s, redirected the surplus to Atlantic Moroccan ports such as Tangier and Essaouira, where it was combined with the mint already used in local infusions and rapidly became a fixture of Moroccan hospitality. This Crimean War account is widely repeated in popular food writing, but historian Graham Cornwell, researching a history of tea and sugar in Morocco, found that none of the writers who tell the story cite any source for it, so it is presented here as a commonly told account rather than a documented fact; what is well attested is that tea imports into Morocco rose sharply in the decades following an 1856 Anglo-Moroccan trade treaty.