Sorrel: The West African Flower That Became Jamaica’s Christmas

It is a hibiscus, and you are not drinking the petals

Jamaican sorrel is Hibiscus sabdariffa, also called roselle — no relation to the leafy garden herb that shares the English name. The plant is native to tropical Africa and travelled to the Caribbean with the transatlantic slave trade.

The part used is not the flower at all. It is the calyx — the fleshy, deep-red cup of sepals that swells around the seed pod after the flower drops. Those calyces are picked, separated from the seed pod, and steeped.

The same plant is drunk across the world under different names: bissap in Senegal, zobo in Nigeria, and — pleasingly — agua de Jamaica in Mexico, where the drink is named after the island rather than the plant.

Why Christmas

There is nothing mystical about the timing. Sorrel is harvested in Jamaica around November and December. The drink belongs to Christmas because that is when the calyces are ready, in the same way gungo peas take over rice and peas at the same time of year.

Seasonal food creates ritual. Because sorrel could only be made in December, making it became part of what December is — and the smell of it steeping is, for a great many Jamaicans, the smell of the season starting.

How it is made

The calyces are steeped in boiling water with fresh ginger, pimento berries and often cloves, cinnamon and a strip of orange peel. It is left to sit — some households for hours, many overnight, and the patient ones for days.

Then it is strained and sweetened, and this is where opinions divide sharply. Some add white rum, some add red wine, some add both, and some households keep a bottle for the children and a very different bottle for everyone else.

It is served cold over ice. The colour is deep crimson, the taste is tart and spicy at once, and the ginger should be assertive enough to catch the back of your throat.