Home › Chafing Dish Delicacies › Flaxseed Tea
Flaxseed Tea
4 cups boiling water sugar lemon juice Boil flaxseed and water one hour, strain, sweeten, and flavor.
Serve hot or cold. 2 cups grapes
A sickroom drink rather than a beverage for pleasure: boiled whole flaxseed gives a slippery, faintly sweet infusion that was taken for coughs and sore throats. The method is simple, but the printed proportions are incomplete.
- The missing quantityThe ingredient list gives 4 cups boiling water, sugar and lemon juice, but no amount of flaxseed. Other linseed tea formulas vary, but something in the region of 2 to 4 tablespoons of whole seed per quart of water is a reasonable starting point; the original here does not say, so treat any figure as a reconstruction.
- Whole seed, not groundUse whole flaxseed. Ground meal will not strain out and turns the tea into a gluey porridge; the point of the long boil is to draw the mucilage off the seed coat while the seeds stay intact.
- An hour of boilingA covered pan at a bare simmer is what is wanted, and even then you will lose a good deal of the four cups to evaporation. Top up with hot water at the end to bring it back to volume.
- StrainingA fine sieve lined with muslin or a double layer of cheesecloth. The liquid is viscous and passes slowly; do not press the seeds or you will push fine sediment through.
- It thickens as it coolsThe mucilage sets to something between a thin syrup and a loose jelly in the refrigerator. If serving cold, thin with water and add the lemon juice at that point so the flavour stays bright.
- Sweetening and flavourSugar and lemon juice are both to taste. Start with about two tablespoons of sugar and the juice of half a lemon per quart; the tea itself is bland and takes a good deal of acid before it tastes of anything.
- YieldAbout three cups after boiling and straining, or four if you make up the loss with hot water. Two or three servings.
Flaxseed tea, called linseed tea on the British side, was a long-standing domestic demulcent: the mucilage that flax seeds release in hot water coats an irritated throat, and the drink was given for coughs, hoarseness and colds well into the twentieth century. Flax was grown chiefly for fibre and for linseed oil, so the seed was cheap and widely available, which is much of the reason the remedy persisted.