Before It Begins

Look for the smallest thing in the cup. Barely bigger than a peppercorn, dark, easy to lose among the larger fruit — the sort of thing you'd walk straight past in a hedge. Which is exactly where it grows, in the scrubby edges of things, on the strip ... more

Among the dark curls and the near-black berries there are pale pieces, much lighter than everything around them, almost pastel by comparison. Pick one up. It has kept its whole shape — you can still see the little clustered surface — and given up all... more

Almost everything in this cup is some version of red. Dark curls, near-black berries, pale pink fruit, even the petals are a warm orange. And then there's one thing that isn't — small, round, hard, matte blue-grey, with a dusty bloom on the skin like... more

Look for the darkest thing in the cup — deep magenta, curled at the edges, slightly leathery, so saturated next to the pale raspberry that it looks almost synthetic. Nearly every bit of red in this morning's tea is coming from that one ingredient, an... more

Watch this tea go from pale pink to a ruby that holds the light like stained glass. Somewhere in that colour, an antioxidant is giving a small piece of itself away so that whatever's beside it doesn't have to. Less a nutrient than a gesture, and it's... more

When this cup is finished, don't throw the leaves away. There's a second cup still in them, and it won't be the same as this one — quieter, warmer, the sharpness gone and something rounder underneath. Easy to call that the lesser cup. Harder to expla... more

The least impressive thing in this cup looks like garden waste. Pale, fibrous, faded, sitting next to the deep green leaf and the bright orange petals — and doing an enormous amount of the work. In most of the cooking cultures that use it, it's the i... more

There is ginger in this cup, and no ginger plant has ever been found growing wild. Anywhere. It doesn't propagate from seed in any reliable way — it spreads from pieces of root, which means every ginger on earth is a division of an earlier plant, han... more