Fire Element · 食疗

Sour Plum Cooling Tea: Beijing's Summer Jar Drink, Sour Not Bitter (Fire)

A heat wave that arrives in late October is a strange thing. The light has gone gold by five, the maples are turning, and the afternoon still hits 92. What you want is something cold and sharp.

In Beijing that is a jar in the refrigerator door: sour plum drink (酸梅汤, suān méi tāng). Dark maroon, faintly smoky, sour enough to make your jaw ache in a good way. It is the one cooling tea the tradition serves over ice.

It is a ritual, not a treatment. It will not fix heat exhaustion, and if you have stopped sweating or you feel dizzy, you need shade and water and probably a doctor.

Sour does a different job than bitter

The summer shelf in a Chinese kitchen runs mostly bitter: mung bean, bitter melon, chrysanthemum. Bitterness is said to clear heat downward, which is why the mung-bean and lotus-seed tea tastes the way it does.

Sour works from the other end. The old texts call it astringent, meaning it holds things in, and the phrase that follows sour plums around is generating fluids (生津, shēng jīn). On a day you have sweated through your shirt by eleven and feel wrung out rather than hot, that is the more useful action.

Sour belongs to Wood in the flavor map, not Fire. This drink sits under Fire because the season does.

What goes in, and why

Two ingredients do the work; two keep it drinkable.

The plum is an unripe fruit smoked over wood until the flesh goes leathery and black. Guaiacol and syringol, the compounds that make bacon smell like bacon, turn a fruit drink into campfire and cellar at once.

Hawthorn has its own history. In Europe a leaf-and-flower extract sold as WS 1442 has been through trials for mild heart-failure symptoms, with modest results. Your berries are food, not that extract, but the procyanidins are the same family.

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup whole smoked dark plums (乌梅, wū méi), about 1 oz
• 1/4 cup dried hawthorn berries (山楂, shān zhā), about 0.7 oz
• 2 strips dried tangerine peel (陈皮, chén pí), about 2 inches total
• 3 dried licorice root slices (甘草, gān cǎo), optional
• 8 cups cold water
• 1/2 cup yellow rock sugar (冰糖, bīng táng), or to taste
• 1 tbsp dried osmanthus flowers (桂花, guì huā), optional

Method

1. Rinse the plums and hawthorn quickly under cold water. Do not soak them; the smoke sits near the surface.
2. Put the plums, hawthorn, tangerine peel, licorice if using, and the cold water in a saucepan. Boil, then drop at once to a bare simmer.
3. Simmer 40 minutes with the lid ajar, until deep maroon and down by about a quarter.
4. Stir in the rock sugar for the last 5 minutes. Sour should arrive first, sweetness second.
5. Off the heat, scatter the osmanthus on top, lid it, and wait 5 minutes.
6. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing the fruit with a spoon. Cool, then chill at least 3 hours.

Chilling it

This drink breaks a rule the rest of the site keeps. Chinese summer eating argues against ice, on the grounds that a cold stomach slows digestion. Sour plum drink is the exception, and Beijing vendors ladle it out of a tub packed with ice.

Chill the pot in the refrigerator for three or four hours instead of pouring it over cubes. Cold without turning watery, and the flavors settle. Use a straw if your teeth are sensitive, because both fruits bring citric and malic acid.

When to reach for it

• A hot afternoon when you are sweating and not hungry.
• The morning after a grilled or fried dinner, when your mouth tastes of last night.
• Plain water has stopped appealing.
• Company coming, and a pitcher beats making anything.

The cautions

Skip the hawthorn entirely during pregnancy; animal work has shown uterine activity. Leave the licorice out if your blood pressure runs high or you take a diuretic, since glycyrrhizin raises blood pressure and lowers potassium with repeated use. The drink is fine without it. Hawthorn has case reports of interacting with warfarin, so ask a pharmacist if you take a blood thinner.

Half a cup across six cups is light by soda standards, not absent. It can be halved.

Make one pot on the next hot afternoon and chill it overnight. You will know within a sip whether the smoke is your thing; if not, drop the plum to a quarter cup and let the hawthorn lead. Fire Element & Summer is the season this belongs to, and Summer Cooling Foods explains why nothing on that list is served frozen.

If you are pregnant, on blood pressure medication, or on a blood thinner, start with the Fire element overview and leave the pot for another summer.

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