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Cowslip (BECAUSE affording an excellent)
BECAUSE affording an excellent sweet wine with decided curative virtues, the Cowslip merits a passing culinary notice. Pliny wrote about this homely flower, “In aquâ potum omnibus morbis mederi tradunt," thus making it seem a veritable panacea. Former medical writers called it the "Palsywort," because of its supposed efficacy in relieving paralysis. Pope has praised the plant for its soporific powers :- "For want of rest Lettuce and cowslip wine: probatum est."
Cowslip salad made from the golden petals, with white sugar, and other adjuncts, is an excellent, and refreshing dish. Also a syrup of rich yellow colour may be made from the petals. One pound of the freshly-gathered blossoms should be infused in a pint and a half of boiling water, and then simmered down with loaf sugar to a proper consistence. This syrup, taken with 66
The page is mostly an essay, but it does contain one workable formula: a cowslip flower syrup. Everything else here — the wine, the salad with "other adjuncts" — is mentioned without a method, and the text breaks off mid-sentence.
- The quantity is the real obstacleA pound of fresh cowslip blossom is an enormous amount — many hundreds of flower heads, since the petals weigh almost nothing. Gathering it from the wild on that scale is not realistic today; Primula veris has declined sharply across Britain and Europe, and uprooting wild plants is illegal in the UK. Cultivated plants or a nursery-grown bed are the only sensible source.
- Imperial pintsA pint and a half here is imperial: 30 fl oz, or about 3½ US cups. Reduce proportionally if you scale the flowers down, which you almost certainly will.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in hard cones, broken up with sugar nippers before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent. No weight is given — for a syrup of keeping consistency, work to roughly equal weights of sugar and strained infusion.
- "A proper consistence"The book gives no temperature. For a syrup that will pour and keep in the refrigerator, simmering to somewhere around 220°F on a sugar thermometer is a reasonable target; boil it much further and it heads toward the candy stages, while short of it the syrup stays thin and ferments quickly.
- Infuse, then simmer — in that orderThe delicate honeyed scent of cowslip is volatile. Pour the boiling water over the blossoms and leave them to steep off the heat, covered, then strain before the sugar goes in. Boiling the flowers themselves gives a syrup that is yellow but flat.
- Which part, and who should skip itThe petals only; green calyces make the syrup grassy and bitter. Primula foliage can irritate the skin — the dermatitis is chiefly associated with Primula obconica, though sensitive people may react to other primulas — so handle with that in mind. The roots, used in older herbal practice, are saponin-rich and are not what is wanted here.
- Ignore the medicineThe "curative virtues", the palsy claim and the soporific reputation are period pharmacology, not fact. Treat the syrup as a flavouring for cordials, custards or cakes.
- YieldNot stated. Boiled down with a like weight of sugar the finished volume is hard to predict; expect somewhat less than the volume of infusion you started with. Refrigerate and use within a few weeks.
Cowslip belongs to the same genus as the primrose, and its name is generally traced to Old English cū-slyppe — literally cow-slime or cow-dung, the flower being associated with cattle pasture rather than simply springing up in it. The book here is a turn-of-the-century compendium of foods treated as remedies, which is why an essay on a meadow flower sits among the recipes: Pliny's line ("drunk in water, they say it cures all diseases") and the old apothecary name Palsywort are quoted as evidence rather than as curiosities, and the couplet about lettuce and cowslip wine comes from Pope's imitations of Horace, where it is offered as a remedy for sleeplessness. Cowslip wine was a well-established English country drink into the nineteenth century, and surviving recipes call for gallon quantities of blossom. Its near-disappearance is usually linked to the loss of the flower itself, which was ploughed and drained out of much of the countryside in the decades following this book's publication.