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To Make Cowslip Wine

A fermented beverage made from cowslip flowers, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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To Make Cowslip Wine

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Make Cowslip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquor

  1. Boil 2 gallons of water with 2.5 pounds of powdered sugar for 30 minutes, skimming off the scum.

  2. Pour the mixture into a tub to cool and add the rinds of 2 lemons.

  3. Once cool, stir in 4 quarts of cowslip flowers and the juice of 2 lemons.

Ferment

  1. Let it sit in the tub for 2 days, stirring every 2-3 hours.

  2. Transfer to a barrel and let it stand for 3 weeks to 1 month.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the wine, adding a lump of sugar to each bottle.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Cowslip flowers
Supply the main floral aroma and flavour of the wine.
Powdered sugar
Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments into alcohol, and sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Bottling with a lump of sugar. Sugar added to each bottle can keep fermenting after bottling, producing carbon dioxide. This builds pressure, so bottles may burst if the wine has not finished fermenting.

“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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