Name: Cowslip Mead
Ingredients: 15 gallons of water; 30 pounds of honey; 16 lemons; 7 pecks of cowslips; 8 tablespoons of new yeast; a handful of sweetbriar

Why it works: Honey and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,707 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cowslip Mead

Ingredients

Directions

Make the honey water

Boil the water and honey until 1 gallon is evaporated.
Skim the mixture and remove it from heat.

Infuse and combine

Cut the lemons in half.
Add 1 gallon of the liquor to the lemons.
Place the remaining liquor in a tub with the cowslips and let it stand overnight.
Combine the liquor with the lemons.
Add the yeast and sweetbriar. Stir well.

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.

Honey + lemontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,707 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Honey: Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and sweetness in the finished mead.
Yeast: Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquor into mead.
Lemons: Add acidity and bright citrus flavor that balances the honey's sweetness.
Cowslips: Steeped in the liquor overnight to contribute their floral aroma and flavor.

“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.