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Linseed
A DEMULCENT drink made from Linseed, the seeds of flax, is most helpful against catarrhal soreness of the chest, with irritating hard cough. These seeds are very rich in oil, containing nearly four ounces in every pound of the seed, together with gum, acetic acid, acetate of potash, and muriate of potash. A Linseed tea may be concocted from the ground seed with cold water, one ounce to the tumblerful, steeped all night, and then poured off (after being stirred) in the morning, and presently allowed to settle. This cold tea is sustaining for consumptive patients. If Linseed is ground into meal, and macerated in boiling water, the abundant mucilage to be obtained from the outer skins makes a poultice as prepared therefrom, emollient, and soothing when applied very hot. The Linseed oil has laxative properties as a medicine; furthermore, when mixed with lime water, it makes an admirably protective covering for recent burns, and scalds. A more elaborate Linseed tea may be thus concocted: Wash two ounces of linseed, putting it into a small strainer, and pouring cold water through it, then pare off as thinly as possible the yellow rind of half a lemon; to the linseed and lemon rind add a quart of cold water, and allow them to simmer over the fire for an hour and a half; strain away the seeds, and to each half pint of tea add a teaspoonful of sugar, or sugar candy, with some fresh lemon juice, in the proportion of the juice of one lemon to each pint of the tea. Powdered sugar-candy with white of egg, as an emulsion, is used remedially in Germany. To make sugar-candy thin strings are suspended in a very strong solution of sugar, which is then left standing in a cool place until the candy forms as crystals about the strings (also on the sides of the vessel.) After the linseed oil has been expressed from the seeds, then their refuse is oil cake, a well known fattening food for cattle. Linseed (linum usitatissimum) was taken in cookery by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but it is difficult of digestion, and affords but little proteid nourishment, whilst provoking troublesome flatulence. In the sixteenth century, during a scarcity of wheat, the inhabitants of Middleburgh had recourse to linseed for making cakes, but the death of many citizens was caused thereby, bringing about in those who partook of the cakes dreadful swellings on the body and face. In Dundee, a hank of (flax) yarn is worn round the loins as a cure for lumbago, and girls may be seen with a single thread of this yarn round the head as an infallible specific for tic doloureux. Linseed oil is substituted for lard on fast days by Italian peasants and labourers.
Two drinkable preparations are buried in this entry: a cold overnight infusion and a simmered lemon linseed tea. The simmered version is the one worth making; several of the other suggestions here belong to 1905 medicine rather than to the kitchen.
- The hinge: strain hot, and expect it to thickenThe whole point of the preparation is the mucilage drawn from the seed coats. Strain the quart through a fine sieve while it is still hot, or it turns to a slippery gel that will not pass. It will thicken further as it cools; loosen with hot water rather than reboiling.
- Whole seed, not ground, for the simmered teaThe instruction to wash two ounces in a strainer means whole flaxseed. Ground seed simmered for ninety minutes gives a cloudy, bitter, sludgy liquid that is nearly impossible to strain.
- Skip the cold overnight steepFlaxseed contains cyanogenic glycosides along with the enzyme that can break them down, and prolonged cold soaking of ground seed is the condition under which that reaction can proceed; a long simmer drives off the volatile products and inactivates the enzyme. Make the boiled version instead, and disregard the claim that the cold tea is "sustaining for consumptive patients."
- UnitsA tumblerful is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. The quart here is imperial, 40 fl oz or about 1.14 litres; a US quart at 32 fl oz gives a noticeably thicker tea, so add a splash more water. Two ounces of seed is about 55 g, roughly a third of a cup.
- Lemon rind means zest only"Pare off as thinly as possible the yellow rind" is an instruction to avoid the white pith, which turns bitter over a ninety-minute simmer. A vegetable peeler does it cleanly. The juice goes in at the end, off the heat, so it keeps its brightness.
- Sugar-candyWhat the book describes crystallising on strings is rock candy, plain sucrose. Ordinary granulated sugar or honey does the same job in the tea; there is no need to follow the crystal-growing digression.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe does not say whether the pan is covered; simmered uncovered for an hour and a half the quart will reduce appreciably, perhaps to something like a pint and a half, three or four servings. Keep it refrigerated and use within two days, since a sweetened infusion of this kind spoils quickly.
- Ignore the burn dressingLinseed oil beaten with lime water is the old "carron oil," long abandoned in burn care; it traps heat and contaminates the wound. The very hot poultice is likewise a scalding risk. Linseed oil sold in hardware shops today is also boiled with metallic driers and is not food.
- Buying the seedAsk for flaxseed rather than linseed at a food shop; they are the same thing, but the second name is more often attached to the industrial oil. Buy it whole and recent, as the oil in it goes rancid fast.
Linum usitatissimum means, literally, "flax most useful" — a plant grown for millennia for two entirely separate products, the stem fibre that becomes linen and the oily seed that becomes linseed oil, paint medium and cattle cake. Linseed tea was standard sickroom equipment across nineteenth-century Britain, valued not for nourishment but for the slippery mucilage that coats an irritated throat, in the same family of demulcents as barley water, gum arabic and slippery elm; the lemon and sugar are there to make an otherwise gluey drink drinkable. The entry comes from a book written when the boundary between the larder and the dispensary was still soft, and its author cheerfully mixes chemical analysis, folk practice and cautionary tale. The Middleburgh story, in which famine cakes of linseed are said to have caused fatal swellings in the sixteenth century, is the sort of tale passed from herbal to herbal and is hard to verify, and the Dundee flax-yarn cures for lumbago and neuralgia are local superstition rather than anything the author is recommending.