‘White coffee’

This could not be simpler to make, and I recommend it highly, although it is not coffee at all, but a perfect digestif after a meal: just hot water, slightly sweetened and flavoured with orange flower water. I first tasted ‘white coffee’ with a Kuwaiti family at their beach house. We had driven down the coast road from Kuwait City, a modern beach development on one side, a camel train stepping through the desert sand on the other. The lunch was magical, olives and dates from the family’s own groves, exquisite dishes of chicken and fish, duck and quail, each served with rice, flavoured and garnished in the appropriate way for the main ingredient. Sweet, sticky pastries and black coffee were taken at small tables, men separate from women, and when we finally left the dining room, small cups of ‘white coffee’ were brought to us on the terrace by the beach.