Skip to main content
Drink

Excellent Coivslip Wine

A homemade wine made by fermenting cowslip flowers with sugar, water, lemon and orange peel, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Excellent Coivslip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquor

  1. Boil water and sugar for 30 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  2. When cool, add toasted bread dipped in yeast and let ferment for 36 hours.

Ferment and mature

  1. Add lemon and orange peels, then pour in the liquor.

  2. Stir the mixture daily for a week.

  3. Add 1 bottle of brandy for every 5 gallons.

  4. Seal the cask and let it stand for 6 weeks 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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

  3. Bread + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  5. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 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

Lump sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and sweetness in the finished wine.
Thick yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation.
Cow-slip-pips
Supply the flower-derived flavour and aroma that defines the wine.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content, stabilising the wine and preserving it against spoilage.

The step that matters

Seal the cask and let it stand. Sealing keeps air out so the wine can mature without oxidising or spoiling. Rushing to bottle before the six weeks are up leaves the wine cloudy and unsettled, since sediment has not yet dropped out.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread, orange, brandy. 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

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes