Té de Hoja Santa

Hoja santa is from southern Mexico. The leaf grows wild and cultivated across Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tabasco, and Chiapas, large heart-shaped, the size of a child's open hand, with a perfume that sits between anise, sassafras, and black pepper. In Oaxaca it wraps tamales and flavors mole verde. Late at night, after the comida is cleared, it goes into the pot for tea.

This is not a flashy drink. It is a senora's tea. The kind that comes after a Sunday meal that started at two in the afternoon and ended somewhere after five, when the molcajete is still on the table and somebody is asking for one more tortilla. You serve it warm in a small clay jarrito with a stick of canela and a little piloncillo. It settles the stomach. It takes the heaviness off mole negro, off carnitas, off whatever the cook spent the morning building.

The leaf does the work. Do not overthink the rest. Toast the canela, do not boil the water hard, and steep no longer than the leaf wants to be steeped. My mother kept a hoja santa plant on the patio in Colonia Roma, transplanted from a cousin's garden in Veracruz. She would pick two leaves after a heavy meal and put on the kettle without saying anything. That gesture was the whole recipe. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this quiet pot belongs to the south.