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Drink

To Make Cowslip Mead

A honey mead flavored with cowslips, lemon, sweetbriar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Honey and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,707 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Make Cowslip Mead

Ingredients

Directions

Make the honey liquor

  1. Boil 15 gallons of water with 30 pounds of honey until 1 gallon is evaporated.

  2. Skim off the foam.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Add the juice from the lemons to 1 gallon of the liquor.

Infuse and ferment

  1. Place the remaining liquor in a tub with 7 pecks of cowslips and let it stand overnight.

  2. Combine the cowslip mixture with the lemon-infused liquor.

  3. Add 8 tablespoons of new yeast.

  4. Add a handful of sweetbriar.

  5. Stir well.

  6. Let it ferment for 4 days.

  7. Strain the mixture.

Age and bottle

  1. Transfer it to a cask.

  2. After 6 months, bottle the mead.

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. Honey + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Honey
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and the bulk of the mead's sweetness.
Cowslips
Contribute the floral aroma and flavour that characterise this mead.
New yeast
Converts the sugars in the liquor into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and helps balance the honey's sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling the honey liquor until 1 gallon evaporates. Boiling dissolves the honey fully and drives off water, concentrating the sugar. Skimming removes foam and impurities that could spoil the flavour. Cooling properly before adding yeast prevents the heat from killing it.

“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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