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Fine Cowslip Wine

A fermented beverage made from sugar, orange juice, egg whites, water, cowslip flowers, orange rinds, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fine Cowslip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar, orange juice, and egg whites in water for 30 minutes, skimming regularly.

Infuse and ferment

  1. Place cowslip flowers and orange rinds in a tub.

  2. Pour boiling syrup over flowers. Stir and cover.

  3. Let infuse.

  4. Once nearly cool, spread yeast on a thin slice of bread and add to the tub to start fermentation.

  5. After 2-3 days, strain the mixture and squeeze the flowers to extract all juice.

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

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Orange + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Egg whites
When boiled, they coagulate and carry impurities to the surface, so they can be skimmed off for a clearer wine.
Seville oranges
Their juice adds acidity and citrus aroma to the wine.
Cowslip flowers
Supply the floral aroma and flavour that the wine is built around.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling syrup over the flowers, then cooling before adding yeast. Boiling syrup extracts flavour from the flowers and rinds, but yeast is killed by very high heat, so the mixture must be nearly cool before the yeast goes in.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

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