Name: Flaxseed Lemonade
Ingredients: 4 tablespoons whole flaxseed; 1 quart boiling water; juice of 2 lemons; sweetener to taste

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 Lemonade

Ingredients

4 tablespoons whole flaxseed
1 quart boiling water
juice of 2 lemons
sweetener to taste

Directions

Pour boiling water over the flaxseed in a container.
Add the juice of the lemons.
Let it steep for three hours, covered.
Sweeten to taste before serving.

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

Whole flaxseed: Releases a gel-like mucilage into the water, giving the drink a slightly thick, silky body.
Lemon juice: Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Sweetener: Adds sweetness to offset the sourness of the lemon juice.

“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.