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Flaxseed Tea
1 tablespoon flaxseed 1 quart boiling water 1 lemon Sugar Put the flaxseed in a pitcher and pour over it the boiling water. Add the juice of the lemon and a few strips of peel, cut off with a sharp knife. Sweeten to taste. This, taken at bed-time, is an excellent remedy for a cold.
A steeped infusion rather than a boiled one, and closer to a home remedy than a beverage. The stray line at the end — "2 slices bread 3 pints boiling water" — is the opening of the next recipe in the book, almost certainly toast water; it has nothing to do with the flaxseed.
- Use whole seed, not groundThe point of the drink is the mucilage that whole linseed releases as it sits in hot water, giving the demulcent, slightly slippery texture. Ground or milled flaxseed turns the pitcher cloudy and gritty and cannot be strained out cleanly.
- Steeping timeThe recipe gives none. Whole seed needs a long steep — commonly a few hours in the covered pitcher, or until the liquid has visibly thickened; a brief steep will draw out little mucilage.
- Strain before drinkingPour through a fine sieve to leave the seeds and peel behind. The seeds swell considerably and are unpleasant in the glass.
- The lemon peel"Cut off with a sharp knife" means paring away the yellow zest only. White pith left on will make the whole quart bitter over a long steep.
- YieldA quart, or about four cups. The recipe says only that it be taken at bedtime; it keeps a couple of days covered in the refrigerator and gels slightly as it chills — reheat gently or thin with hot water.
- Sweetening"Sweeten to taste" in this period means sugar, stirred in while the water is still hot so it dissolves. Honey is a reasonable substitute and suits the intended purpose.
Flaxseed tea, or linseed tea, was standard sickroom equipment in English and American households from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, and it appears in pharmacopoeias alongside barley water and gum arabic as a demulcent — a drink whose value lay in its texture, coating a raw throat rather than treating anything. The mucilage comes from the seed coat, which swells in water into a soft gel; the same property is what makes linseed useful in poultices.