On Masala chai and coming home

Chai, the Hindi word for tea, has in recent decades become the term used in Western cultures to refer to a flavored milk tea drink made by brewing black tea with milk infused with Indian herbs and spices. Cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and occasionally ginger and even pepper can be added to the infusion and left to simmer and let their flavor permeate the milk and tea mixture. Then the spices and tea are strained out, leaving the finished product to be sweetened into a delicious brew redolent with gentle but aromatic flavors that are a delight to the nose and tongue.
That said, despite the growing popularity of chai in coffee houses across America and other nations, my mother makes the best chai I have ever tasted, and has been doing so for as long as I can remember.

When I was young, the height of my culinary joys was coming home from a long, hard day of elementary school to find the subtle but delicious scent of milk and spices gently greet me upon opening the front door. I immediately knew that Mom was making chai, and that if I had arrived at the right point in the process, there would be a small but dainty teacup full of spiced milk waiting for me on the dining room table. She would always make chai the same way, simmering the milk, sugar and spices on the stove for a longer period of time before adding the loose leaf tea that, at the tender age of six or seven, was wisely deemed too caffeinated for me.

Instead, my younger sister and I would sit and sip delicately from our little cups, the small teacups decorated with the New York skyline that resided in the cupboard for every other occasion except this, the creation of the rare and lovely beverage of spiced milk. Even before the brew cooled enough to drink, we would inhale the wisps of steam that rose gently from the cups, "sipping" at the air through mouth and nose and catching ever newer and more subtle scents and flavors as the tea brewed in the kitchen and the spiced milk cooled gently in our cups. We would exchange secretive smiles between sips, wondering when we would be old enough to drink proper chai like Mom and Dad and Auntie Palmo. Even after the spiced milk was gone, we would stand in the kitchen and sniff at the simmering pot with its forbidden brew, drinking in the small differences that marked this as the grown-ups' drink. The smoky scent of loose black Indian tea combined with the sweetness of the sugared milk, the fiery hint of cinnamon, the smoky-bitter musk of cloves, and the sharp green scent of cardamom to make something that seemed utterly foreign and fascinating, something familiar but just that little bit different than our white-bread lives.

It took some years before I realized that the scent of chai, of Indian herbs and spices, reminded me of my Aunt Palmo for a reason other than that Mom always seemed to make it when Auntie Po was visiting. My mother's next eldest sister, Catherine Rybicki had rebelled against her strict Catholic upbringing in a decidedly stronger manner than that of her other younger siblings. In her travels around Asia after leaving college, she had converted to Buddhism and, in time, changed her name to Ani Palmo and taken vows as a Buddhist nun. In my youth she lived and taught classes on meditation and compassion in an apartment in the city of Cleveland proper, a three-room paradise full of things I was forbidden to play with but that endlessly fascinated me--altars, figurines, mandalas and tapestries--and permeated with the scents of incence and spices. These spices and incense permeated the robes she wore, emanated from the thermos of chai she often carried, and made me think paradoxically of far-away places at the same time they reminded me of coming home to find my mother humming while a pot of steaming milk simmered on the stove.

When I first came to college, I brought with me a small packet of ingredients for chai. Whole cardamom, cinnamon sticks, black tea bags, and whole cloves, packed lovingly by my mother amongst many other supplies for the care and feeding of her college student. I knew she had packed it for me, I had asked her to and had watched her as she did, but in of those first few weeks of missing home enough to be lonely but not enough to want to leave this brand new world, stumbling suddenly upon the small bag of chai makings in a desk drawer was almost enough to make me cry. I remember sitting on my bed, closing my eyes and opening that bag, and as the smell of tea and spices drifted out I was once again back in that perfect moment of opening the door at home and having my mother and my aunt waft out to embrace me in the delicious, subtle scent of chai.