Imperata Root, Green Sugarcane & Carrot Drink

Why people make this drink

This is perhaps the most approachable of all Cantonese cooling drinks: three common, inexpensive ingredients that come together in under an hour into something genuinely refreshing. The combination is well known across generations — parents serve it to children after a measles or chicken pox recovery when the child is feverish and irritable; adults reach for it during hot weather or after a stretch of rich eating; and it appears regularly as a household remedy for the cluster of symptoms that Cantonese medicine labels “intestinal heat” — bad breath, scanty dark urine, constipation, restlessness at night, and nightmares.

The key ingredient is the green-skinned sugarcane (qing pi zhe), not the dark-purple-skinned variety. The green type is cooling and moistening; the dark type is warming and more tonifying — the two are not interchangeable for this purpose.