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Syrup of Cowslips
Upon every gallon of cowslip flowers with their white part cut off pour a quart of boiling water. Put the pan containing them over a very slow fire, where it must simmer gently during six hours. Let it stand till next day, then replace it over a good fire until it reaches the boiling point, but before ebullition commences remove it from the fire. Squeeze out the flowers as hard as you possibly can, and add the same quantity of fresh flowers. Make the preparation boil; but the moment ebullition begins, replace it on the slow fire, and let it simmer again for six hours. Again let it stand till next day, when, having heated it as before, but without boiling, squeeze out the flowers while hot, and to every pint of the expressed juice add two pounds of sugar dissolved by standing the pan in boiling water. Now set it on the fire, and stir it until the scum rises; then remove it from the fire, and skim it; repeat this until no more scum rises. Let it now have a single boil, and run it through a jelly-bag. When quite cold, bottle it in pint bottles.
A two-stage flower infusion turned into a heavy preserving syrup. The method is sound, but the quantities assume a meadow full of cowslips that almost nobody has access to now.
- Sourcing the flowers firstCowslips (Primula veris) collapsed in numbers across Britain with meadow ploughing and are locally scarce; in the UK it is an offence to uproot any wild plant without the landowner's permission, and picking from wild colonies is poor practice. Use flowers from cultivated plants or a grower who sells them for culinary use, and avoid roadside or sprayed ground.
- A gallon of flowersThis is a volume of loose flower heads, not a weight — an imperial gallon is about 4.5 litres of blossom, which is a very large basketful and perhaps 250-350 g. Scale the whole recipe down proportionally rather than trying to match it; the ratio that matters is a quart (about 1.1 litres imperial) of boiling water to that volume of flowers.
- "With their white part cut off"The pale green-white calyx tube and base of the corolla are bitter and grassy. Pinching out the yellow petal ring alone is tedious but is the difference between a fragrant syrup and a vegetal one.
- EbullitionSimply the point at which the liquid breaks into a boil. Through the infusion stages the instruction is to bring it just to that point and pull it back, with only a single brief boil allowed at the end — prolonged boiling drives off the volatile scent that is the entire purpose of the exercise.
- Six hours of simmeringOn a modern hob use the lowest setting with a tight lid, or hold the pan in a low oven at 90-100C. Uncovered for six hours you will lose most of the quart of water to steam and scorch the flowers.
- The sugar ratioTwo pounds of sugar to a pint of juice is roughly 900 g to 570 ml — a very heavy syrup, and that concentration is what preserves it. Dissolving it over a water bath rather than direct heat, as directed, keeps it from catching and colouring.
- Skimming and the jelly-bagThe scum is plant matter and impurities thrown up as the syrup heats, and it will cloud the finished syrup if left. Let the bag drip; squeezing it at this stage undoes the skimming.
- Bottling and keepingThe recipe bottles it cold; if you prefer, fill scalded bottles while the syrup is still hot and seal at once, or refrigerate. Unopened it will keep for months on the strength of the sugar; once opened, keep it cold and treat it as you would a cordial. Dilute for drinks or spoon over cream puddings.
- One caution about handlingSome primulas, most notably Primula obconica, contain primin and related sensitisers, and prolonged handling of large quantities of primula foliage and stems can cause contact dermatitis in susceptible people. Gloves are sensible if you are stripping several litres of flowers.
Cowslips — paigles, in older English usage — were once so common in hay meadows that country households gathered them by the pailful for wine, conserves, vinegars and syrups, and Cassell's prints this alongside other flower preparations at a time when such a yield was still plausible. The syrup sat on the border between kitchen and stillroom: herbals from Culpeper onward recommended cowslip preparations for headache and sleeplessness, a reputation generally traced to the plant's mild sedative folk use rather than to any tested effect, and by the Victorian period the syrup was mostly a flavouring and a sweet cordial. The double infusion, spent flowers pressed out and replaced with fresh, is the standard stillroom technique for building strength in a delicate floral extract, the same logic behind an enfleurage in perfumery. What has changed is not the method but the raw material: agricultural intensification in the twentieth century took the cowslip meadow with it, and a recipe that once began with a morning's picking now begins with a nursery order.