Drink Recipes From Around the World.

Drinks are recipes, and in most of the world they are the recipes people make most often. Nothing else in a kitchen gets repeated daily for a lifetime the way coffee and tea do, which is why the rituals around them are so specific and so fiercely defended. Turkish coffee is ground finer than any other method requires and judged on its foam rather than the liquid underneath. Indian masala chai is boiled — properly boiled, with the milk in the pot, which horrifies tea purists elsewhere and produces something they cannot replicate. Moroccan mint tea is poured from a height to aerate it and served three times, each glass deliberately different from the last. Beyond the hot drinks sit the ones built for heat and thirst: Mexican horchata and aguas frescas, Peruvian chicha morada simmered from purple corn with pineapple and clove, Vietnamese cà phê sữa đá dripping slowly onto condensed milk, salted lassi across North India, and the tart steeped and fermented drinks of West Africa and Eastern Europe. These cost almost nothing to make and are close to impossible to buy correctly outside their home countries. The recipes here give ratios and technique instead of vague instructions, and note where a substitution genuinely works and where it produces something that deserves a different name.

23 recipes on this route