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Drink

To Make Cowslip Mead

A honey mead flavored with cowslip flowers, lemon, and sweetbriar, fermented with 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 and add 30 pounds of honey until 1 gallon is evaporated.

  2. Skim off the foam, then remove from heat.

Infuse and ferment

  1. Add the halved lemons to 1 gallon of the liquor.

  2. In a tub, combine the remaining liquor with 7 pecks of cowslips and let it stand overnight.

  3. Mix the cowslip infusion with the lemon liquor, add 8 tablespoons of new yeast and a handful of sweetbriar.

  4. Stir well and let it ferment for 2 to 4 days.

  5. Strain the mixture and transfer it to a cask.

Age and bottle

  1. 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 body of the mead.
Cowslips
Add floral aroma and flavour to the mead during infusion.
New yeast
Ferments the sugars in the honey liquor into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Lemons
Add acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness of the honey.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam after boiling. Foam rising during the boil carries impurities and proteins from the honey and water. Removing it before cooling keeps the mead clearer and reduces off-flavours.

“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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