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Wine, Cowslip
Take seven pounds of moist sugar, two gallons and a half of water, and two ounces of hops, and boil them together. Pare the rinds of eight lemons or Seville oranges, or a part of each; pour the boiling liquor over them; when this is cool squeeze the juice from the fruit, and add this to the liquor. Ferment the whole with yeast in the usual way, and put it into the cask. Gather cowslips on a fine day, carefully picking out all stalks and leaves. Put into the cask for every gallon of wine as much of the flowers as would equal a quart when fresh gathered; stir well till the flowers sink. Dissolve three ounces of isinglass in a little of the wine, and return it to the rest to fine; in a few days bung it up close. In six months the wine will be fit for bottling, but it will improve by being kept longer in the cask. By managing as just described, the wine will be fined in the cask, and will be as good from the cask as if bottled, which will be a great saving of trouble.
A Victorian country wine of the standard type: a hopped sugar must flavoured with citrus peel, fermented, then infused with cowslip flowers in the cask and fined with isinglass. Most of the work is in sourcing the flowers legally and controlling the fermentation.
- Cowslips firstPrimula veris declined sharply through the twentieth century, though it is still locally frequent. Uprooting any wild plant without the landowner's permission is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; picking flowers of an unlisted species is not itself an offence, but on a scarce local population it is unwise. Use cultivated plants from your own garden or a nursery, and expect to need a very large number of heads.
- How many flowers that is"As much of the flowers as would equal a quart when fresh gathered" means loose, uncompressed flowers measured by volume, about 1.1 litres per gallon of wine. The recipe asks only that stalks and leaves be picked out; later practice was to use just the yellow pips, on the grounds that the green calyx adds bitterness.
- GallonsCassell's is British, so these are imperial gallons: two and a half gallons is about 11.4 litres, not 9.5. Scale the flowers to imperial gallons too.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is soft light brown sugar, unrefined and slightly sticky. Ordinary granulated sugar works and gives a cleaner flavour; light brown adds a faint molasses note.
- The sugar load is highSeven pounds in 11.4 litres is roughly 280 g of sugar per litre, a potential alcohol near 16 per cent. Most yeasts stall well below that and leave the wine cloying. Modern practice is to reduce the sugar to about 1 kg per imperial gallon, or add it in stages and stop when the gravity reading tells you to.
- HopsTwo ounces (about 57 g) of whole hops in this volume is a substantial bittering charge, closer to a beer than a wine. It acted partly as a preservative before sulphite was in general use. A quarter of that quantity is plenty for flavour if you want the cowslip to show.
- "Ferment with yeast in the usual way"For a Victorian household this meant brewer's barm pitched into an open tub. Use a sachet of wine yeast plus nutrient, ferment under an airlock, and sanitise everything; the citrus peel and open cask stage are exactly where acetobacter and wild yeast get in. Add the flowers after the vigorous ferment has slowed, as the recipe implies.
- IsinglassThree ounces is far more than needed by modern standards, and isinglass is fish swim bladder, so it is not vegetarian. Bentonite or a proprietary finings kit at the manufacturer's dose does the same job; cowslip wine also clears well simply by being left alone in a cool place.
- Bunging and timingBung tight only once fermentation has genuinely finished, or the vessel will build pressure. Six months in cask is a minimum; a year gives a rounder wine. Yield is roughly 11 litres, about fifteen 750 ml bottles.
Cowslip wine was the best known of the English flower wines, made in April and May when the meadows were yellow with what country people called paigles or peggles. The flavour was prized as delicate and faintly narcotic, and cowslip preparations had a parallel life in domestic medicine as a mild sedative, which is often said to be why the wine had a reputation for inducing sleep. Recipes of this kind are a reminder that a Victorian household wine was rarely made from the flavouring ingredient alone: the body came from cane sugar, the keeping quality from hops and citrus acid, and the flowers were an infusion laid over the top. What has changed most is supply. Cowslips grew thickly enough in unimproved grassland that gathering a quart of pips per gallon was an afternoon's work for children; a century of ploughing, drainage and fertiliser reduced the plant so sharply that the same recipe now reads as a small act of vandalism unless the flowers are grown deliberately.