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FEVER DRINK
Pour cold water on wheat bran, let boil half an hour, strain and add sugar and lemon-juice. Pour boiling water on flax-seed, let stand till it is ropy, pour into hot lemonade and drink.
Two separate sickroom drinks are compressed into one paragraph here: a bran tea and a flaxseed lemonade. Neither gives quantities, so treat the proportions below as the working versions.
- Read it as two recipesRead it as two parts -- The first sentence makes bran water sweetened with sugar and lemon; the second makes flaxseed mucilage stirred into hot lemonade. They may be two separate drinks, though the "hot lemonade" of the second sentence could equally be the sweetened bran water of the first.
- Bran proportionsThe recipe gives none; about 1/2 cup wheat bran to 1 quart cold water is a workable proportion. Boil half an hour as directed, then strain through a fine sieve or muslin — the point is the starchy, faintly sweet liquid, not the bran.
- Flaxseed proportionsA tablespoon of whole flaxseed to a cup of boiling water, covered and left 15-20 minutes, gives the "ropy" texture. Use whole seed, not ground meal, and strain it out; ground flax turns the drink gritty and bitter.
- What "ropy" meansNot spoiled. Flaxseed hulls release soluble mucilage that makes the water slippery and thread-forming, which is the whole reason for the ingredient — it coats a raw throat.
- Don't boil the flaxseed hard or longThe recipe pours boiling water over the seed and lets it stand rather than boiling it; prolonged hard boiling makes for a bitter drink. Steeping in water just off the boil is enough.
- Lemon and sugarAdd both after straining and off the heat, so the lemon keeps its brightness. Roughly the juice of half a lemon and 1-2 teaspoons sugar per cup, to taste.
- Yield and keepingYields depend entirely on the water used, since the recipe specifies none. Both are dilute liquids that sour quickly; refrigerate and discard after 24 hours.
- Quantity in a dayFlaxseed infusions are traditionally taken by the cupful, not the quart. Whole flax also carries a mild laxative effect.
American household manuals of the 1870s and 1880s commonly carried a "Food for the Sick" chapter, and its drinks were built on one idea: a bland, slightly viscous liquid that would slip down an inflamed throat and supply a little sugar and water to someone who could not eat. Barley water, rice water, toast water, gum-arabic water and flaxseed tea all belong to the same family of demulcents, inherited from much older European invalid cookery and from the apothecary's shelf as much as the kitchen's. Bran water was the cheapest of them, using the byproduct of the household's own flour, while flaxseed came from the same paper packet kept for poultices. Lemon juice did double duty as flavor and as the era's understood remedy for feverish thirst. Buckeye Cookery, which appeared in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, having grown out of the earlier Buckeye Cookbook, and was compiled from contributed receipts, presents these without dosage or diagnosis because the reader was assumed to be nursing at home, with a doctor visiting at intervals if at all.