Skip to main content
Drink

Slippery-elm Tea

A tea made from slippery elm bark steeped in water, sweetened with sugar and lemon, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Slippery-elm Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Break the slippery elm bark into bits.

  2. Pour boiling water over the bark and cover it.

  3. Let it infuse until cold.

  4. Sweeten to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve over ice for summer disorders.

  2. Add lemon juice and drink.

Powdered version

  1. In a tumbler, mix 1 teaspoon of powdered slippery elm with cold water.

  2. Season with lemon and sugar.

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

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

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

Slippery-elm bark
Releases mucilage into the water, giving the tea its thick, slippery texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the sweetness.

The step that matters

Let it infuse until cold. The bark releases its mucilage slowly into the hot water, so a short infusion gives a thin, weak tea with little of the slippery body.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes