Cranberry Chai Ice Cream

Is autumn ice cream season? Trick question! Ice cream is never ever out of season. Or out of the question. Or out of my mind, for that matter.

Oh sure, autumn is a great time for other desserts too.  I mean, if you meditate hard enough on the image of yourself on a long walk through the woods, watching the colourful leaves tumble through the brisk autumn air, I'm pretty sure that an apple pie will magically manifest itself in your oven.  If only.  But if you're anything like me, you're pretty much down for a cold dessert at any time of the year.  I grew up in a place where the winters routinely reach -40° (Celsius and Fahrenheit - they cross over at that horrifying nexus), so perhaps my tolerance for cold is a little on the extreme side, but I still think that the appeal of a good ice cream isn't bound by season or climate.  With the fresh flavours of berries and stonefruit more-or-less behind us, we can instead turn our attention to the bounties of fall. Apples, pumpkins, and cranberries are all spectacular fall treats, and are worth exploring in a wide range of sweet and savoury dishes.  Interestingly, the fruits of fall seem particularly well suited to bold and highly aromatic spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves.  I mean, it's become a cliché at this point, but look at pumpkin spice.  There's a reason that so many people look forward to it.

But I'm getting side-tracked here.  This is cranberry chai ice cream, not pumpkin spice ice cream.  I've got nothing against PS, but I wanted to walk a trail a little less traveled here, and to take a look at how the fascinating and flavourful spiced chai came to exist in the first place.

I feel a touch guilty. This is a recipe for cranberry chai ice cream, and I might be selling the cranberries a bit short.  They're delicious, fascinating fruits, and they deserve to be used more often (and not just with turkey).  But as I pondered what I wanted to write about for this post, my mind kept coming back to the chai, because... well, because it's just a fascinating subject. Sure there's a lot more going on in the recipe itself, but I'm not going to argue with fair Clio when she deems fit to set a story idea rattling about my brain.  And after all, if you're itching to jump to the food itself, that's what the Recipe Notes section (not to mention the Jump to Recipe button) are for.

Tea (and more specifically masala chai) is intimately associated with the Indian subcontinent, and much beloved there today - but this hasn't always been the case.  Chai, you may already know, simply means tea (in a variety of languages).  This is why the term "chai tea" is redundant. Outside of India, the word 'chai' is often used alone to refer to the sweet, milky, spice-heavy prepared tea drink properly known as masala chai.  Tea is important of course, but it's the masala - a fragrant and warming blend of spices - that really sets Indian chai apart.  While masala chai is today a quintessential part of the food culture of South Asia, it came into being only thanks to the peculiar intersection of volatile global economics, ancient traditions, and imperialism.

Before I go further, I want to pause and say that the history of tea in the Indian subcontinent is incredibly complex.  I can't really get into the nuances in this short space, but I will try to hit on a few of the key reasons that it grew to prominence, and to explore how the spice-centric masala chai came into being.

The tea plant, Camellia sinensis, is native to China (most likely the southern region of Yunnan), where it has been popular for thousands of years.  Initially treated as medicinal concoction, the popularity of tea grew and spread in East Asia over the centuries.  By the 16th century, Portuguese traders and priests had become acquainted with the beverage, and its popularity began to spread in Europe.

The popularity of tea quickly spread beyond China to Japan, Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia, but initially made only limited headways into the Indian subcontinent.  A local strain of tea plant was grown by the Singpho (or Jingpo) people of Northeastern India, but the plant was not widely known or regarded outside of this area. But the status of tea in India (and indeed the world) would soon change in massive ways thanks to an insatiable European desire for the drink, and a growing conflict between two other nations.

By the 17th century, tea drinking had become firmly ensconced in Britain, along with a novel tea culture.  China enjoyed an absolute monopoly on the tea trade for centuries - a fact which drew the ire of the powerful and increasingly expansionist British Empire.  China was uninterested in trade, and would only accept silver as payment for tea, silk, and other goods. This imbalance caused England to mount considerable debts, leading to increasingly desperate attempts to manipulate the tea markets.  One of these attempts went famously awry in 1773 when revolutionaries in the American colonies dumped tea into Boston Harbour in protest over taxes that had been added by the British government.  This event - the Boston Tea Party - set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the Revolutionary War and formation of the United States of America, further imperiling the economy of Britain.

By the early 19th century, demand for tea in Britain had grown considerably, but the economics of the situation had many in England feeling panicked.  The now-globally powerful British Empire became determined to reverse its economic troubles by gaining control of the lucrative tea trade.  This rather complicated task required all manner of shady (or outright illicit) machinations, and would have geopolitical ramifications that are still felt to this day.  The British East India Company had noted with great interest the endemic tea growing methods of the Singpho people in the Assam region of Northeastern India, and a local tea industry had begun to make tentative steps in the 1820s and 1830s.  But the Assamese tea industry was small, and the demand in Europe was for the specific tea varieties that were grown in and controlled by China.  Beginning in the 1840s, tea plants and cultivation secrets were illegally smuggled out of China and into Assam.  Initial attempts to grow Chinese tea plants went rather poorly, but the continued 'importation' of information and even tea experts eventually helped build a flourishing tea industry.

Of course, Assam's tea industry could only grow so fast, and it wasn't even close to being able to meet the British demand for tea in the early years. Not content to wait, the British East India company turned to another rather more nefarious tool to help them balance the economic inequality of the Chinese tea trade: opium.  The British had discovered that the opium was virtually the only product that they could obtain that was in demand in China. They began producing it in huge quantities in Bengal in order to import the drug to the East - along with the far more addictive smoking methods adapted from the North American tobacco pipe. China banned the trade, causing the British East India company to begin smuggling it through middlemen and smaller traders. In 1839, The Chinese Empire confiscated some 20,000 chests of opium, causing the British Empire to take action and setting off the first Opium War.  European victories yielded massive concessions and unequal treaties in China, massively shifting the balance of the tea economy (amongst other things).  The Qing Dynasty of China was economically and politically eviscerated, and collapsed entirely in 1912.  The Anglo-Indian tea industry, meanwhile, continued to develop.  By the turn of the 20th century, India and Sri Lanka (which had only taken to growing tea after the disease-related collapse of its coffee industry) were producing over 80% of the British Empire's tea.

All of this has only gotten us through the 'chai' part of masala chai.  India was, for all intents and purposes, an economic puppet in Britain's tea economy.  Sensing the potential of a domestic market, colonial authorities and corporations began promoting the consumption of tea within India, only to find that it was rather slow to catch on.  What little tea had been consumed locally had been used for medicinal reasons, and the tea-loving fervour that had driven Britain to war(s) wasn't shared by most Indians.  Things began to change in the 20th century when the Indian Tea Association began promoting not only tea, but tea culture and the custom of a teatime break for workers across the country.  The ITA (then a British organization) promoted tea in the English style, with a little added milk and sugar, but inventive and locally attuned vendors quickly began modifying it to Indian tastes.  The spices that were so beloved in Indian cooking lent themselves to a new kind of tea - one made with the dark, flavourful, fully fermented teas of India, brewed with milk and a good deal more sugar.  This echoed, in some ways, the medicinal ingredients that had been added to teas and other concoctions in ancient Ayurvedic traditions, but the flavours were chosen more with enjoyment in mind.  The ITA (and the English) weren't thrilled at first; masala chai requires less actual tea to make per cup served, meaning less tea was used, and therefore purchased. But masala chai exploded in popularity, and the tea culture of India had been born and grown into something entirely unexpected.  It was agreeable and unique, but also variable - anyone could tweak their masala to their own tastes, and different chaiwalas could create unique recipes to entice customers and keep them loyal.

The popularity of masala chai has spread globally, to the point where ready-made bagged teas, syrups, and drink blends can be found with ease at many coffee shops and grocery stores.  Despite the enormous variability possible in the ingredients, "chai" has effectively become a flavour of its own.  And that's really how we end up here, with a recipe for cranberry chai ice cream - a world away from the origins of masala chai - or simple tea, for that matter.  But it's not all that surprising, in my opinion; masala chai is warming, sensory, and just plain likeable.  The spices work so well with so many flavours - and if they don't quite work for you, well you can change them.  Western masala blends tend to focus heavily on cinnamon or cassia, while ground ginger and cardamom are more characteristically Indian.  Ultimately, whether you follow my recipe, adapt it to what you have on hand, or tweak it to your own tastes, I hope you'll take a moment to appreciate just how complex and strange the story behind your dessert truly is. It need only be a moment of course - you wouldn't want your ice cream to melt.