Té de Chaya con Hierbabuena

Chaya is a Yucatán plant. It grows in the back patios of houses from Mérida to Valladolid, in the milpas of Maya farmers in Quintana Roo and Campeche, and along the roads of the peninsula where almost no other green will thrive. The Maya call it chay or chaay. The Spanish called it tree spinach. Both names undersell it. Chaya has more iron, more calcium, and more protein than almost any leaf you can grow in a Mexican garden, and Maya women have been brewing it into a daily tea for at least a thousand years.

The rule with chaya is simple and absolute: you must boil it. The fresh leaf carries small amounts of hydrocyanic compounds that cook off in fifteen minutes of simmer. Raw chaya is not food. Cooked chaya is medicine. The señoras in the Mercado Lucas de Galvez in Mérida sell it in tied bundles and they will look at you sideways if you ask about juicing it raw the way the foreign wellness magazines suggest. Esto no es comida de un solo México, and chaya is not kale.

The yerbabuena and the Melipona honey are what make this a Yucatecan drink and not just a leaf tea. Yerbabuena, Mexican spearmint, grows in pots on every back patio in the peninsula. Melipona honey comes from the stingless bee that the Maya have kept in hollowed logs since long before the conquest, and the flavor is unlike any honey from a European bee, floral, slightly sour, with a depth that ordinary honey cannot reach. My notebook has a page from a doña in Maní who served me this tea after a long morning of recording her recipe for relleno negro. She said her mother served it to her in the mornings when she was a child, and her mother's mother before that. La cocina no es decoración, es trabajo, and so is the medicine that comes out of it.