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Flaxseed Lemonade
Another old-fashioned and generally effective remedy for colds is this laxative drink: Pour a quart of boiling water over a cup of flaxseed. Add juice of two lemons and sugar to taste. Let steep in covered jug several hours and drink hot just before retiring. (This may be thinned if preferred.) LEMON CORDIAL (Old Recipe) Steep for twenty-four hours the yellow rinds (only) of two dozen lemons in a gallon of French brandy, meantime having rolled the lemons and squeezed pulp with juice into four pounds of sugar dissolved in a gallon of water. Strain, and when the lemon rind is ready to mix add a quart and a pint of milk at boiling point. Let stand twenty-four hours, then strain and bottle.
Two lemon drinks sit side by side here: a hot flaxseed tisane taken as a cold remedy, and a clarified milk punch of the eighteenth-century type. Both work, but each hinges on one step the original states quickly.
- Strain the flaxseed drinkA cup of whole flaxseed in a quart of boiling water yields a thick, slippery mucilage rather than a clear tea. Steeped several hours and poured off through a fine sieve, it is drinkable; unstrained it is closer to gruel, which is what the note about thinning is getting at.
- Quantities and yieldA quart is 4 cups; the flaxseed drink makes roughly that, or three to four servings. The cordial is on a preserving-kitchen scale: a gallon of brandy plus a gallon of sugar syrup plus a quart and a pint of milk comes to well over two gallons before straining losses.
- French brandyOrdinary grape brandy at about 40% ABV, not Cognac specifically. With a gallon of spirit diluted by the syrup, juice and milk, the finished cordial probably lands somewhere in the mid teens by volume, which together with the sugar and the lemon acid helps preserve it in the bottle.
- The hinge: the milk is a clarifying agentBoiling milk poured into an acidic, spirituous liquid curdles at once. The curds carry harsh oils and suspended matter out of solution; after twenty-four hours you strain them off and are left with a clear, silky cordial. Milk that is only warm curdles more slowly and less cleanly, and stirring the curd back in while straining will cloud the result. Use a jelly bag or several layers of cloth and let it drip without pressing.
- Yellow rinds onlyPared zest with no white pith. Twenty-four lemons' worth of zest in a gallon of spirit is a heavy oil extraction; steeping much beyond the stated twenty-four hours risks bitterness.
- Rolling the lemonsRolling under the palm before cutting is traditionally held to rupture the juice sacs and improve the yield of juice. Worth doing, as the recipe directs.
- On the medicinal claimFlaxseed is a bulk-forming laxative and needs to be taken with plenty of fluid to work as intended. Whole flaxseed also carries small amounts of cyanogenic compounds, harmless in culinary quantities but a reason not to treat a cupful a night as routine. This is a period remedy, not medical advice.
- Keeping the cordialBottle it full, cap tightly and keep it dark. Because the milk solids are removed, a properly strained batch stays clear and keeps for years; cloudiness reappearing usually points to incomplete straining.
The second recipe is a clarified milk punch, a form that flourished in Britain and America from the late seventeenth century onward and is often associated with the punch-making of the colonial spice and citrus trades; recipes of this shape circulate under the names of several eighteenth-century figures, and versions were still being copied into household books when this collection was compiled. Clarifying with hot milk was held to solve a real problem in an age before fine filtration: it was said to strip the harshness from rough spirit and the bitterness from citrus oil, and it made a punch that kept unusually well in bottle. The flaxseed lemonade belongs to a different tradition entirely, the domestic sickroom, where linseed tea sweetened and soured with lemon was a common standby for coughs and colds through the nineteenth century. That the two are printed side by side says something about how such volumes were used: a lemon heading was expected to cover the medicine chest and the sideboard alike.