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Flaxseed Tea
Cover an ounce of flaxseed and a bit of liquorice root with a pint of boiling water. Let it stand on the back of the stove for four or five hours. Do not boil. Strain through a jelly bag. This should be made fresh every day and is very soothing to the throat.
A demulcent infusion rather than a tea in the botanical sense: what you are extracting is the mucilage in the flaxseed hull, which is why heat is kept low and time long.
- Quantities in modern termsAn ounce of whole flaxseed is roughly 3 tablespoons; a pint is 2 cups. The "bit of liquorice root" is undefined, but a single dried stick or about a teaspoon of chopped root is enough to flavour a pint.
- Whole seed, not mealUse whole linseed/flaxseed. Ground meal releases oil and fine solids that turn the infusion cloudy, bitter and impossible to strain clear.
- "Back of the stove" means about 150-170F"Back of the stove" means gentle heat -- on a coal range that was the cooler part of the top, where nothing simmered. The recipe names no temperature; anything that keeps the water hot without simmering (a covered jar in the lowest oven, a thermos flask, or a pan on the lowest burner setting) reproduces it. Four to five hours of that steady warmth is what draws the mucilage out.
- Do not boil, and whyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Boiling draws out the seed oil along with the mucilage, which is what the bitterness is usually blamed on, and tends to give a gluey liquid instead of a clear slippery one.
- StrainingA jelly bag is a close-woven cloth bag for clarifying jelly. Doubled muslin or a coffee filter in a sieve does the same job; the liquid runs slowly because it is viscous, so let it drip rather than squeezing.
- Liquorice root is not neutralGlycyrrhizin in real liquorice root raises blood pressure and depletes potassium when taken regularly in quantity. Anyone with hypertension, heart or kidney trouble, or who is pregnant, should leave it out; the flaxseed alone is the soothing part.
- Make it freshThe instruction to make it daily is sound. A sugar-free plant infusion left at room temperature spoils quickly, and the mucilage sets to jelly on standing. Refrigerate what you do not drink and discard it within a day.
Flaxseed tea belongs to the old category of demulcents, taken not for nourishment but for the slippery coating they leave on an irritated throat. Linseed and liquorice were long paired in cough preparations in English and American domestic and medical manuals, and the pairing survived into the commercial cough lozenge. Invalid cookery was a recognised branch of household writing in this period, often with its own chapter in general cookbooks, on the assumption that the sick were nursed at home by the women of the house.