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Cowslip Wine
Allow three pounds of loaf sugar, the rind of an orange and a lemon, and the strained juice of a lemon to every gallon of water. Boil the sugar and water together for half an hour. Skim it carefully, then pour it over the rind and juice. Let it stand until new-milk warm, add four quarts of cowslip pips or flowers, and to every six quarts of liquid put three large table-spoonfuls of fresh yeast, spread on toast. On the following day put the wine into a cask, which must be closely stopped. Twenty-four or forty-eight hours to ferment; seven weeks to remain in the cask, when it will be fit either for bottling or drinking.
A country flower wine of the old kind: sugar, citrus, blossoms and bread yeast, with almost nothing said about hygiene or gas pressure. Most of what needs translating is the vessels, the yeast and the flowers themselves.
- Cowslip "pips"The pips are the individual yellow florets pulled from the umbel, with the green calyx tubes left behind; the calyx and stalk are traditionally blamed for making the wine bitter and grassy. Four quarts of pips is an enormous quantity — likely some thousands of flowers — though the recipe does not make clear whether that is per gallon or for the whole batch.
- Picking cowslipsPrimula veris was once a hedgerow weed but declined sharply through the twentieth century. In the UK it is an offence to uproot any wild plant without the landowner's permission, and picking on this scale from the wild is not defensible; cultivated cowslips grown for the purpose are the only sensible source.
- Which gallonCassell's is British, so a gallon here is the imperial gallon, 160 fl oz — about 1.2 US gallons or 4.5 litres. Scaling the recipe on US gallons will leave the must noticeably sweeter.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight. Three pounds to the imperial gallon gives a starting gravity high enough for a strong, sweetish wine.
- New-milk warmRoughly blood heat, 95-100F (35-38C). Pitching yeast much hotter than this kills it; the instruction is a genuine one and worth a thermometer.
- Yeast on toastFresh baker's yeast spread on a floating slice of toast was the standard way to inoculate a must before packeted wine yeast existed. It ferments, but bread strains give off flavours and quit at low alcohol. A modern dried wine yeast, rehydrated and pitched directly, is what any current recipe would call for.
- "Closely stopped"Do not seal a fermenting vessel airtight. A vigorous ferment generates enough carbon dioxide to blow a bung across a room or burst a closed container; an airlock is the point at which old practice and modern practice genuinely diverge. The "twenty-four or forty-eight hours to ferment" most likely refers to the violent first stage only, with the seven weeks in cask covering the remainder, though the text does not say so explicitly.
- BottlingSeven weeks is short for a must this sweet. Bottling before fermentation has finished is the classic cause of exploding bottles; a stable hydrometer reading over several days, not the calendar, is the signal.
- YieldAs written the recipe scales per gallon. One imperial gallon of must gives about six 75 cl bottles after racking losses.
Cowslip wine is one of the better documented of the English flower wines, made wherever the plant grew thick in old meadows — herbalists praised cowslip for its supposed calming and sleep-inducing virtues, and the wine carried that reputation into domestic use as a mild household cordial as much as a drink for pleasure. Its appearance among the other country wines of the period reflects a late-Victorian household economy in which sugar had become cheap enough for ordinary families to ferment whatever the hedgerow or garden produced in glut. The recipe's scale is the clearest sign of a vanished landscape: four quarts of pips assumes fields yellow with cowslips in spring, a sight that agricultural improvement and ploughing of old grassland made rare.