Skip to main content
Drink

Cowslip Wine

A fermented wine made with cowslip flowers, sugar, water, and ale yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Cowslip Wine

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cowslip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water in a large cask.

  2. While the solution is still warm, add the ale yeast.

  3. Allow the mixture to ferment until fermentation nearly ceases.

  4. Add the cowslips and let fermentation continue.

Bottle

  1. Once the wine is clear, transfer it into bottles.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Ale yeast
Ferments the sugar solution, producing the alcohol that defines the wine.
Cowslips
Add floral aroma and flavour to the wine as fermentation continues.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to ferment until fermentation nearly ceases. Fermenting too briefly leaves residual sugar that can keep working in bottles, while the wine needs to settle clear before bottling so sediment stays behind.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes