Cowslip Wine
INGREDIENTS._ To every gallon of water allow 3 lbs. of lump sugar, the rind of 2 lemons, the juice of 1, the rind and juice of 1 Seville orange, 1 gallon of cowslip pips. To every 4 gallons of wine allow 1 bottle of brandy. AVERAGE Cost, 2s. 9d. per gallon. 1 Boil the sugar and water together for 1/2 hour, carefully removing all the scum as it rises. Pour this boiling liquor on the orange and lemon rinds and the juice, which should be strained; when milkwarm, add the cowslip pips or flowers, picked from the stalks and seeds; and to 9 gallons of wine 3 tablespoonfuls of good fresh brewers' yeast. Let it ferment 3 or 4 days, then put all together in a cask with the brandy, and let it remain for 2 months, when bottle it off for use.
TIME.-To be boiled 1/2 hour ; to ferment 3 or 4 days; to remain in the cask 2 months.
SEASONABLE. Make this in April or May.
A country flower wine scaled for a cask, with Victorian assumptions about equipment, yeast and sugar. The quantities work, but several of the details need translating before you start picking.
- Gallons are imperialBeeton's gallon is 4.55 litres, not the US 3.79. Working in imperial, one gallon of water takes 3 lb (1.36 kg) sugar, a heavy charge whose potential alcohol runs well into the teens; how much of that the yeast actually converts, and how sweet the wine is left, depends on the strain.
- What a "pip" isThe cowslip pip is the individual yellow floret pulled from the umbel, green calyx and stalk discarded. A gallon of loose pips is an enormous amount of picking, which is why the recipe assumes access to a meadow.
- Picking cowslips todayPrimula veris is far scarcer than it was in 1861, and in the UK uprooting any wild plant without the landowner's permission is illegal. Take flowers only from garden-grown or cultivated plants, or from a stand you own and can afford to thin.
- Lump sugarLoaf sugar broken into pieces; plain granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent. Loaf sugar was in fact the refined grade, but the half-hour boil and skimming cleared whatever scum rose and are unnecessary with modern sugar, though boiling still sanitises the must.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in season January and February and so out of season in April. Frozen Seville juice and zest, or the peel of a bitter orange kept from winter, both work; a sweet orange plus a little extra lemon is the usual stand-in.
- "Milkwarm" and the yeastMilkwarm means roughly blood heat, around 37C, warmer than is ideal for pitching modern yeast; cool to 20-25C. Brewers' yeast tends to give a bready flavour and has lower alcohol tolerance; a sachet of dried wine yeast is the sensible replacement, and the ratio given (3 tablespoons to 9 gallons) sits oddly with the otherwise gallon-based ingredient list.
- Fermentation vesselsThree or four days in an open tub is only the vigorous first stage. Rack into a demijohn under an airlock afterwards and leave it until fermentation has genuinely finished — bottling at two months regardless of activity, as written, is how you get bottle bombs. Check with a hydrometer for a stable reading before bottling.
- The brandyOne bottle to four gallons is a light fortification, roughly 4% of the volume, added as much for keeping as for strength. Add it after fermentation stops, not during.
- YieldAn imperial gallon fills about six 75 cl bottles. The wine is drinkable young but sharpens and clears considerably after a year.
Cowslip wine was among the best known of the English flower wines, made in April and May when the pastures were yellow with Primula veris — the paigle of older country dialect. It was widely made in rural households with access to a meadow, and it carried a mild reputation as a sedative and a nervine, cowslip flowers having long been used in domestic medicine as a calming infusion; that association is traditional rather than clinically established. Beeton files it among the home-made wines alongside ginger, rhubarb and raisin, all of them ways of turning a brief seasonal glut into something that would keep in a cask through the year. The recipe is also an accidental record of loss: the hay meadows that made a gallon of picked pips a reasonable request were largely ploughed up or improved in the twentieth century, and cowslips became a plant people stopped for rather than harvested.