Skip to main content
Drink

Wine, Cowslip

A fermented beverage made from sugar, water, hops, citrus rinds, cowslip flowers, isinglass, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Wine, Cowslip

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the sugar, water, and hops together.

  2. Pare the rinds of the lemons or oranges and pour the boiling mixture over them.

  3. Once cool, squeeze the juice from the fruit and add it to the mixture.

  4. Ferment the mixture with yeast as usual and transfer it to a cask.

Add the cowslips

  1. Gather cowslips on a fine day, removing all stalks and leaves.

  2. For every gallon of wine, add enough flowers to equal 1 quart when fresh.

  3. Stir well until the flowers sink.

Fine and age

  1. Dissolve the isinglass in a little wine and return it to the cask to fine.

  2. Bung the cask tightly after a few days.

  3. In six months, the wine will be ready for bottling, but it improves with longer aging.

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

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

  2. Hops + lemontop 40% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sugar + hopstop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Moist sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast turns into alcohol, and sweetness in the finished wine.
Hops
Adds bitterness and aroma that balance the sweetness and help preserve the wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Isinglass
Fining agent that gathers suspended particles so they settle, clarifying the wine.
Cowslip flowers
Contribute the floral aroma and flavour that characterise this wine.

The step that matters

Dissolve the isinglass in a little wine before adding it. Isinglass is a collagen-based fining agent that must be fully dissolved first; lumps won't spread through the liquid and clear it evenly, leaving cloudiness behind.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, hops):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, hops. 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.

You might also like

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