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Flaxseed Lemonade
This is very soothing to patients suffering from colds. One quart of boiling water; four tablespoons of whole flaxseed; two lemons; sugar. Boil the flaxseed in the water for three hours, letting it steep slowly. Strain, sweeten to taste, and add the juice of the lemons. If too thick, add a little water.
A demulcent drink from the sickroom chapter, and one of the few invalid recipes that still works as written. The only real adjustment is scale: three hours of slow simmering will reduce a quart considerably.
- FlaxseedWhole brown or golden linseed, sold in any health-food aisle. It must be whole, not ground or milled — ground flax will not strain out and gives you a gritty sludge rather than a clear mucilage.
- "Boil ... letting it steep slowly"The instruction is contradictory by modern usage; what is wanted is a bare simmer with the lid on, barely bubbling. A hard boil for three hours will reduce the liquid sharply and can leave it tasting bitter. Twenty to thirty minutes at a low simmer already extracts most of the mucilage if you are short of time.
- Topping up the waterOver three hours an uncovered quart can lose half its volume. Keep it covered and add boiling water as needed to hold roughly a quart, or you will end up with something closer to gel than lemonade.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve while hot — the liquid is viscous and thickens further as it cools, and a cold batch is very slow to drain. A second pass through a sieve lined with muslin gives a clearer drink.
- Lemons and sugarAdd the juice off the heat, after straining, so the fresh flavour survives; two lemons yield roughly 4-6 tablespoons. Sugar to taste is usually 2 to 4 tablespoons for a quart, and honey works in its place.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart, or four glasses, served warm or chilled. Refrigerate and use within two days — the mucilage is a good medium for bacteria and the drink continues to thicken in the cold.
Flaxseed, or linseed, tea was a fixture of nineteenth-century domestic medicine, valued for the mucilage the seed coat releases in hot water — a slippery infusion that coats a raw throat, which suits the recipe's own claim that it is 'soothing to patients suffering from colds.' Adding lemon and sugar was a common way of making an unappealing medicinal tea into something a patient would drink willingly, as with barley water, slippery elm tea and gum arabic drinks. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, also published cook books, and many general household manuals of the period carried a chapter of soft, bland, mostly liquid preparations for the bedridden. Flaxseed's soothing effect on irritated membranes is not folklore alone; the mucilage is still the basis of its use as a bulk laxative today.