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Cowslip or Clary Wine

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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

  1. Boil sugar, water, and hops together.

  2. Shave the rinds of the lemons or oranges and add them to the boil for the last 15 minutes.

  3. Squeeze the juice from the lemons or oranges and set aside to add later.

  4. Rinse the pulp in the hot liquor.

  5. Add yeast and let it ferment for 2 days.

  6. Tun the liquor and keep it filled with wine or new beer until fermentation stops.

  7. Cover with brown paper and let it sit for 4 to 8 months.

  8. Gather cowslip flowers on a dry day, remove stalks and greens, and dry them on trays.

  9. Once dry, store flowers in paper bags until ready to use.

  10. Add flowers through the bung-hole, stirring them down 2-3 times a day until they sink.

  11. Dissolve isinglass in a little wine and add it to the mixture.

  12. Cover again with paper and let it sit for 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

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.

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