Sulaimani Tea: The Spiced Black Tea of Kerala’s Malabar Coast, With Recipe

Writer Aysha Tanya, who grew up in a Mappila family, describes how it is made: black tea leaves are steeped, sweetened and brewed until the tea reaches the right shade of golden. It is served in tiny glasses, “usually with cardamom, occasionally with a few strands of saffron, but always with lime.” In Malayalam, tea itself is chaya.

Our earlier Tea 101 notes give two more names for it, ghava and kattan chaya, and describe it simply as black tea with lemon, with roots in South India, best after a heavy meal.

It is not only Kerala’s. A reader of our Mumbai story pointed out that in Mumbai, “every Muslim joint worth its keema pao and bheja fry has a ‘sulemani’,” a black tea served in a glass with a wedge of lemon. Our own history of Indian tea lists Sulemani chai among the styles each region made its own.

Writer Aysha Tanya describes it as the unsung hero of the Eid meal: after mutton biryani and dessert, “there is still a little room left for a sulaimani.” It is “the color of a deep sunset”; at weddings, huge vats of black tea simmer all day and small cups are passed around, even in summer.

Her family’s Eid shows where it fits. The day begins with mutta surka, puffs of rice flour and egg, served with eggs scrambled with onions, fennel seeds and green chilies, and a round of tea. Lunch is mutton biryani with date pickle and coconut chutney, then dessert, and only then the sulaimani. “Biryani and sulaimani. The names even rhyme,” she writes: one of the most complex Mappila dishes, followed by the simplest.

In Kozhikode a food program for people in need was named Operation Sulaimani, after a scene in the Malayalam film Ustad Hotel. In the scene, a young chef sits by the sea with his grandfather, a kettle of piping-hot sulaimani between them. A reader in Turkey wrote to our blog after watching the film, and another tasted sulaimani at a college food-for-a-cause event, with a mint leaf on top and a clear note of cinnamon.

Ingredients: 3 cups water · 1 teaspoon black tea leaves · a 1-inch piece of cinnamon · 2 cardamom pods · a pinch of saffron · 2 teaspoons lime juice · 3 teaspoons sugar, or to taste

1. Crush the cardamom and cinnamon with a mortar and pestle.
2. Bring the water to a boil, adding the crushed spices as it heats.
3. Pour the boiling water over the tea leaves and steep for one minute.
4. Strain, add the lime juice, sugar and saffron, and stir to dissolve.
5. Serve at once, in small glasses.

The blog’s proportions are light: one teaspoon of leaf for three cups of water, steeped for only a minute, for the golden, sunset color the story describes. Saffron also turns up in Kolkata’s street chai, always in small amounts: a few strands are enough.