“I love to cook; I love food and beverages,” says Philip Lutgendorf, AB’71, AM’82, PhD’87. And when the University of Iowa professor made his first trip to India, he remembers, “I became addicted to chai immediately.” There’s a proper way to brew the drink. “Chai is a way of preparing tea that uses copious amounts of milk and sugar and typically boils all the ingredients together,” he says. “Sometimes it has other things in it as well, although not to the extent that most Americans think.” Don’t get Lutgendorf started about the chai sold at global chains like Starbucks. “Most of the chai in the United States doesn’t taste anything like the chai you get in India. There’s an American assumption that it has to reek of certain kinds of spices to qualify as Indian,” he sighs. “Chai in America tastes like pumpkin pie—it’s very heavy on cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg.” Real Indian chai might sometimes be spiced with small amounts of ginger and cardamom, but “the first rule of chai is that it has to be strong and taste like Assam tea.” Street vendors make a potent brew—what they call karak, in Hindi—that tastes best in an unglazed clay cup. Lutgendorf, who has written two influential books on India, traveled around the subcontinent researching the social history of tea. He spoke about his findings in Tableau, the Humanities Division magazine, and shared the recipe he uses to brew chai in his Iowa kitchen.