While all the other spring teas seem to capture the fragility of some experienced emotion, the Kinnikinnick revolves around the persistence of memory – Its flavors seem to carry the memory of spring.
Kinnikinnick is a mystical Native American word meaning ‘to mix something animate with the inanimate’. It also traditionally refers to a mixture of herbs, bark and tobacco, smoked ceremonially for spiritual purposes. But ceremoniously smoked or not, the idea is to commit to a voluntary sensory experience to inspire some long forgotten but significant memory, not to relive it but to access it, savor it or somehow ‘complete’ it. You see, the senses are not just faculties that create memory, they are also the only way to recall experiences when you have no idea of what you intend to recall! Aroma and taste will bring up memories, long forgotten in sheer vividity – connecting the animate to the inanimate – experiencing what’s now known as a Proustian moment.
Well, the flavor of this spring tea immediately sparked ‘Kinnikinnick’ into recollection – felt ancestral, primordial, ritualistic – but not before a memory of tobacco smoke, mixed with faint feminine perfume, coming off a cardigan on a winter morning, experienced some 30 years ago, shocked attention. It indeed was exactly as Proust described in the first volume of ‘In search of lost time’, when he tastes the Madelaine cake dipped in tea. He writes:
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate, a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me, with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me……… Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand……. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea”.
The world indeed has become small, both in time and space – an ancient native American word, a French writer’s work from the early 1900s, a cup of Darjeeling tea all coming together in 2024 to narrate an experience that neither of the three intentioned. It’s absolutely wondrous- Feels like both you and I have experienced this before. Is it still Deja-Vu if it feels shared?
We can’t say, if this ‘animate-inanimate mixture’ will indeed conjure a Proustian moment with its sweet, herbaceous, toasty, pastoral aroma of hay and sweet-tobacco taste, but we can most definitely tell you that the floral, faint perfumy liquor that leans towards fruity as it cools down, will invoke yearning for Madeleine cakes and easy Sunday mornings. While you can expect the yearning to be somewhat fulfilled with the appearance of citrous and mango notes sliding alongside a lazy apricot honey sweetness, the yearning itself still persists, diving deep into memory to extract a Proustian moment. Even if the revelation eludes you at the time, it might just register as a moment you may revisit many years form now, inspired by some other peculiar, unrelated aroma – a Proustian moment for the future! We cannot stress enough, the peculiarity of how the sweet tobacco flavor prolongs and accentuates the honey fruity aftertaste, as the constant aroma of hay accommodates the more floral smells, like meadows of spring. There is no mistaking the condensed milk sweetness towards the end along with hints of Vanilla. The wet leaf corroborates the ‘spring meadow’ and ‘madeleine cake’ references with its inherent sweet aromas reminding one of fresh jam and muskmelons, complete with the grassy notes.
“Seek? More than that: create – The essence is not within you, it is you”.
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