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Flaxseed Tea and Lemon

A warm beverage made by boiling flaxseed in water, then adding sugar and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flaxseed and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Flaxseed Tea and Lemon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the cold water and flaxseed together for 1 hour.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the cooled mixture.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flaxseed + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flaxseed + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flaxseed
Releases mucilage into the water, giving the tea its body and slightly thick texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tart lemon and the earthy flavor of the flaxseed.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus flavor that brightens the mild tea.

The step that matters

Boil for the full hour. Flaxseed releases its soothing mucilage slowly into the water, so a shorter boil gives a thin, weak-bodied tea. Keeping the mixture at a steady boil extracts enough of it to thicken the liquid.

Swap the flaxseed

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Flaxseedthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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