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Drink

Flaxseed Tea

A tea made by steeping unground flaxseed in boiling water, then straining and sweetening it.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Place the flaxseed in a teapot or pitcher.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the flaxseed.

  3. Cover the vessel tightly and let it sit by the fire for at least 1 hour.

  4. Strain the mixture into a cup.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Sweeten with loaf sugar and add lemon juice if desired.

  2. Let it cool 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.

  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

Unground flaxseed
Releases mucilage into the water, giving the tea its thick, soothing body.
Boiling water
Extracts the flaxseed's soluble compounds into the liquid during steeping.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flaxseed, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flaxseed, 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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