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Drink

Excellent Cowslip Wine

A fermented wine made with cowslip flowers, citrus peel, sugar, water, and yeast, finished with brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 Cowslip Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquor

  1. Boil 1 gallon of water with 3 pounds of sugar for 30 minutes, skimming off the scum.

  2. Once cool, add a crust of toasted bread dipped in thick yeast to the mixture and let it ferment in a tub for 36 hours.

Steep and age

  1. In a cask, add the peel of 2 oranges, the rind of 1 lemon, and 1 gallon of cowslip flowers.

  2. Pour the fermented liquor into the cask and stir carefully every day for a week.

  3. After a week, add a little brandy for every 5 gallons.

  4. Seal the cask tightly and wait 6 weeks before bottling.

Bottle

  1. Use the best corks for sealing the bottles.

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. Orange + lemontop 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

Sugar
Provides the fermentable sugar that yeast converts into alcohol, giving the wine its body.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation of the liquor.
Cowslip flowers
Supply the floral aroma and flavour that defines the wine.
Brandy
Added in small amounts to raise the alcohol content and help preserve the wine.

The step that matters

Sealing the cask tightly. Yeast fermentation is still active in the cask, and a loose seal lets air in, which can spoil the wine by encouraging unwanted microbes and oxidation, while a tight seal keeps the wine stable during the six-week rest.

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.

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