Té de Poleo Oaxaqueño

Poleo belongs to Oaxaca. It grows wild in the Sierra Norte and the Sierra Sur, along the streams that run through the Mixe and Zapotec villages, and the women who walk those hills know which patches to cut and which to leave for the next season. This is not the spearmint your market sells in plastic clamshells. Poleo is sharper, almost medicinal, with a pulegone note that grabs the back of your throat the moment you smell it. Esto no es comida de un solo Mexico. This is Oaxacan, specifically.

The tea is what you drink the morning after a mezcal night. The senoras at the Mercado de Etla pour it from clay ollas into barro cups and they do not ask if you want sugar, they look at your face and decide. If you look bad enough, you get it bitter. The chilled limonada de poleo is the other side of the same plant, the version poured at the end of a calenda when the band has stopped and the dancers need something cold and herbaceous to bring them back.

Use fresh poleo if you can find it. Dried works, and is what most cooks outside Oaxaca will have to use, but the fresh herb has a brightness the dried version cannot match. Do not boil it. Hot water, not boiling, the same rule that applies to dried chiles. Boiling bruises the oils and you end up with a flat, grassy tea instead of the medicinal, floral one this is supposed to be. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and that includes knowing how to make the tea that fixes what last night broke.