Moringa - Whole Dried Leaves

Moringa is a tree, which already makes it unusual in a range of seeds and flowers. Moringa oleifera grows fast, tall and thin, throws out the long ribbed pods that give it the name drumstick tree, and carries small round leaflets in sprays along fine stems. Those leaflets are what is in this pouch: picked, shade-dried and left whole rather than milled. Native to north-west India, it is now planted across the tropics, Egypt included.

Be clear about the form, because almost everything sold as moringa is a fine green powder and this is not that. Powder is convenient and also anonymous: once a leaf is milled you cannot see what went into it, and the surface exposed to air multiplies enormously. Whole dried leaf keeps its colour and shape and lets you judge it by eye - a clear grey-green, never khaki or brown, the leaflets still recognisably leaves.

The taste is green and frankly a little bitter - nearer spinach or a strong matcha than anything in the herbal tea aisle - with a peppery edge behind it. That pepperiness is not incidental: moringa sits in the same botanical order as mustard, cress and horseradish, and shares the compounds that make all three sharp. The tree's other name, the horseradish tree, comes from its root; the leaf is a gentler version.

Egypt has a longer relationship with the tree than the current fashion suggests, though not a culinary one. Moringa seeds press an oil the Greeks and Romans knew as ben oil, valued in ancient Egyptian perfumery for two dull and excellent reasons: it has almost no smell of its own and goes rancid slowly, which makes it an ideal carrier for other scents. The Arabic name for the tree, al-ban, is the same word.

As a food the leaf is thoroughly ordinary wherever the tree grows. In south India murungai keerai is cooked with coconut and mustard seed, dropped into sambar and dal, or stirred through egg. In the Philippines malunggay goes into tinola, the ginger chicken soup, added at the end so it barely wilts. In West Africa the dried leaf goes into sauces and porridges. It is a vegetable in those kitchens, not a novelty.

Treat it as a dried herb, not a tea bag. As an infusion: a teaspoon of crumbled leaf per cup, water well off the boil - around eighty degrees - for three to four minutes, no longer. Hotter water and a longer steep both pull out bitterness, so the common complaint that moringa tastes harsh is usually a brewing problem. Lemon, ginger or honey round it off. In cooking, crumble it into lentils, soup, rice or eggs in the last minute.

Its popularity has an agricultural explanation rather than a mysterious one. Moringa grows very quickly, tolerates heat and drought that would kill most crops, and can be cut for leaf again and again through the year, so development programmes across the tropics have promoted planting it for decades. That is why it turned up everywhere at once, and why Egypt grows it - it suits land that suits little else.

You will find moringa sold with a long list of promises attached to it. There are none here. This is a leaf: green, slightly bitter, peppery, cooked and drunk in many countries, and sold as exactly that. Moringa leaf has a long history of traditional use as a food and an everyday drink in the regions where the tree grows, and that is offered as a description of the custom, not as a health claim or medical advice.