Top 100 tea/coffee recipes

by Mary Ward,

Gazelle Books, £12.50

Latte, espresso, cappuccino, green tea, herb tea, blah blah. If you have a similarly yawn-worthy drinks menu that’s seldom spiced up with a seasonal special, then you could draw inspiration from these two books. Among the coffees are an iced cardamom coffee and a spiced Viennese coffee, made with cinnamon sticks, cloves and all-spice berries. Or how about an English Flaming Tea Cup, made with green tea, orange, cloves, corn syrup, port and rum, and described thus: "This tea is most unusual"? Or if that’s too hot to handle, try a tropical tea frappé to cool off. There’s a wealth of ideas here, not least an explanation of the processing-to-brewing cycle. The tea book is only undermined by a quote from the New York Times in the older US edition we previewed, proclaiming "Tea is becoming the coffee of the ’90s". We must have missed that.