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Drink

Best Drink for a Cold

A cold remedy drink made with flaxseed, lemon juice, sugar, and boiling water.

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 ↓

Best Drink for a Cold

Ingredients

Directions

Make the flaxseed infusion

  1. Pour boiling water over flaxseed in a pitcher.

  2. Let steep for 3 hours.

  3. Strain the liquid, leaving flaxseed in the pitcher.

Finish the lemonade

  1. If too thick, thin with cold water.

  2. 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

Flaxseed
Releases mucilage into the water, giving the drink its thick, silky body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's sharpness.

The step that matters

Strain the liquid, leaving flaxseed in the pitcher. Flaxseed releases a gel-like mucilage as it steeps. Straining out the seeds at the right point keeps the drink smooth and stops the liquid from becoming gritty or overly thick.

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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