Skip to main content
Drink

Cowslip or Clary Wine

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cowslip or Clary Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil sugar with water and hops for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the rinds of lemons or oranges for the last 15 minutes.

  3. Squeeze the juice.

  4. Add the juice when the mixture cools.

  5. Rinse the pulp in the hot liquid.

  6. Ferment with yeast for 2 days.

Cask and flowers

  1. Transfer to a cask.

  2. Keep the cask filled with wine or new beer while it ferments.

  3. Seal with brown paper.

  4. Let it sit for 4 to 8 months.

  5. Gather cowslip flowers on a dry day.

  6. Remove stalks and greens.

  7. Dry the flowers on trays.

  8. Store in paper bags.

  9. Add dried flowers through the bung hole.

  10. Stir daily.

Finish and age

  1. Dissolve isinglass in a little wine.

  2. Add to the mixture.

  3. Seal again with paper.

  4. Let it age for at least 6 months before bottling.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Hops + winetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methylguaiacol (smoky, spicy).

  4. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Sugar
Provides the sweetness and the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Hops
Adds bitterness that balances the sweetness and helps keep the wine stable.
Lemons or seville oranges
Supply acidity and aroma from the rinds and the juice.
Cowslip flowers
Give the wine its characteristic floral flavour and aroma.
Isinglass
Acts as a fining agent that clears the wine by drawing out suspended particles.

The step that matters

Keep the cask filled while it ferments. Fermentation pushes foam and air out of the cask. Topping up with wine or beer keeps the surface free of air, which limits spoilage and oxidation.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, hops, wine. 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 WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes