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LINSEED TEA (Invalid Cookery)
Put an ounce of linseed into a jug, pour over it a pint of boiling water, cover closely, and let it stand for half an hour. Pour it into another jug, and serve either hot or cold. Half an ounce of Spanish liquorice may be put with the linseed if the tea be wanted for anyone with a cough. Sufficient for one person.
A demulcent drink from the invalid-cookery pages, made by steeping whole flaxseed until the water turns slippery. It is simple, but two of the ingredients need translating and one carries a real caveat.
- Linseed is flaxseedBuy whole brown or golden flaxseed, not the ground meal sold for baking. Whole seed releases its mucilage slowly and stays out of the finished drink; ground seed turns the whole jug to sludge and cannot be poured clear.
- An ounce to a pintAbout 3 tablespoons of whole seed to an imperial pint (20 fl oz, roughly 570 ml) of boiling water. The stated yield of one person is generous by modern standards; it makes about two mugs.
- The transfer is the straining"Pour it into another jug" is the whole method: the liquid is poured off the swollen seed rather than filtered. A fine sieve over the second jug does the job better, and the tea should be faintly viscous, like thin syrup. That slipperiness is the point of the drink.
- Cover closely, and mean itThe jug is not heated further, so all the extraction comes from the initial boiling water held in. A plate or lid on top for the full half hour keeps the temperature up; an uncovered jug gives a weak, watery result.
- Spanish liquoriceThis is hard black liquorice-root extract, sold in blocks or sticks, not modern liquorice confectionery, much of which is largely sugar, flour and flavouring. Half an ounce is about 14 g; break it up so it dissolves in the hot water.
- Liquorice is not a free additionGlycyrrhizin in real liquorice root raises blood pressure and depletes potassium when taken regularly. A cup or two is unremarkable; a daily jug for a week, at the dose given here, is not advisable, and anyone on blood-pressure or heart medication should leave the liquorice out.
- FlavouringThe plain tea is bland and slightly slimy. Lemon juice and honey, both period-appropriate additions to invalid drinks, make it considerably easier to swallow.
- KeepingMucilaginous infusions spoil quickly and thicken further as they cool. Make it fresh, refrigerate anything left over, and use it the same day.
Linseed tea belongs to a family of demulcent drinks — barley water, gum arabic water, slippery elm, marshmallow root — that filled the sickroom chapters of nineteenth-century household books. Their logic was straightforward and largely sound: a viscous liquid coats an irritated throat and eases a dry cough, and it delivers fluid to a patient with little appetite. Flax has been cultivated for its seed and fibre since antiquity, and linseed poultices and infusions appear in British and European domestic medicine well before Cassell's. Spanish liquorice was a common cough sweetener of the era, an imported block extract of Glycyrrhiza glabra root sold by chemists and grocers alike; the name is usually taken to reflect the Spanish and Italian trade in liquorice paste rather than any Spanish invention. That a general dictionary of cookery devoted a section to invalid cookery at all is telling: with hospital care limited and convalescence long, feeding the sick was routine kitchen work.