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Drink

Flaxseed Lemonade

A drink made by cooking flaxseed in boiling water, then straining and adding lemon juice and sugar.

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 Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over and wash the flaxseed.

Make the drink

  1. Add the flaxseed to boiling water and cook for 2 hours, keeping just below boiling point.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add lemon juice and sugar to taste.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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

Whole flaxseed
Releases mucilage into the water, giving the lemonade a thick, slightly gel-like body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Keeping the flaxseed just below boiling point. Boiling vigorously for two hours can break up the seeds and make the liquid cloudy or overly thick. Gentle simmering just below boiling extracts the mucilage smoothly while keeping the drink clear enough to strain well.

Swap the flaxseed

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar. 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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