Egyptian Anise (Yansoon) - Whole Seed for Infusion

Yansoon is the Egyptian drink of comfort. It is what a household makes at bedtime, what gets pressed on you when you have a cough, and what is traditionally brought to a woman who has just had a baby. Of everything in this range it is the least touristic and the most domestic - almost nobody sells it as a souvenir, and almost every Egyptian kitchen has a jar of it.

This is true anise, Pimpinella anisum, and it is worth being precise about that because three different plants get muddled together constantly. Star anise is Illicium verum, a woody star-shaped fruit from a tree in China and Vietnam, botanically unrelated. Fennel is Foeniculum vulgare, a different plant again, with a larger, greener, more grassy seed. All three taste like each other because all three are built around the same aromatic compound, anethole - but they are not interchangeable, and this pouch is the true one.

What we call the seed is technically the dried fruit, a schizocarp, the same as cumin and coriander. It is small, ridged, grey-brown and slightly hairy, and it should smell sweet the moment you open the pouch. Anise grows well in Middle Egypt - Assiut, Minya and Beni Suef - where the crop has been grown for a very long time indeed.

How long is unusually well documented. Anise is named in the Ebers Papyrus, the Egyptian medical text of around 1550 BCE, and Egypt was one of the earliest centres of its cultivation. The Romans took it seriously enough to bake it into mustaceum, a spiced cake served at the end of wedding feasts, which food historians regularly point to as an ancestor of the wedding cake. There are not many things you can buy in Egypt with that continuous a paper trail.

The one technique that matters: crush the seed before you brew it. The anethole is held inside the fruit wall, and whole uncrushed seed in hot water gives you a pale, thin drink while most of the flavour stays in the pouch at the bottom of the cup. Press the seeds with the back of a spoon or give them a few seconds in a mortar - you are not grinding to powder, just cracking them open. One teaspoon of cracked seed per cup, water just off the boil, five to seven minutes, covered. Sweeten if you like. The Egyptian variant is yansoon bi laban, made with hot milk instead of water, which turns it into something closer to a dessert.

In the kitchen it belongs in baking above all - Egyptian kahk and biscuits, Mediterranean breads and rusks, fig and date pastries. A little goes into fish, and into rich meat where the sweetness cuts fat. Anise is also the backbone of the anise spirits of the Mediterranean, from arak to ouzo to sambuca, if you want to make your own infusion.

Unlike the leaf teas in this range, anise seed is dense and compact. A kilogram of it is a small heavy brick rather than a suitcase-filling pillow, which is why we offer the full ladder up to 1 kg here and not on the mints.

In Egypt yansoon is traditionally drunk for a cough or a cold, to settle the stomach after a heavy meal, and it is traditionally offered to new mothers. That is a description of long-standing Egyptian custom, not a medical claim, and not a substitute for advice from a doctor or pharmacist.