Name: Flaxseed Tea
Ingredients: ½ pound flaxseed; ½ pound rock candy; 3 lemons; 2 quarts boiling water

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

½ pound flaxseed
½ pound rock candy
3 lemons
2 quarts boiling water

Directions

Prepare

Slice the lemons and add them to a bowl with flaxseed and rock candy.
Pour 2 quarts of boiling water over the mixture.

Steep and strain

Let it stand until very cold.
Strain before drinking.

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.

Flaxseed + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together151 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 a slightly thick, smooth body.
Rock candy: Adds sweetness that dissolves into the warm water.
Lemons: Add acidity and bright citrus aroma to the tea.

“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.