In Alison Uttley’s charming little book, Recipes From An Old Farmhouse, she describes how when she was a child there was an expedition each spring to gather cowslips for wine. I’m not sure if these days cowslips are protected, but I don’t think they are abundant enough any more to be able to pick enough to make wine. They smell heavenly… I wonder if the wine tastes heavenly. She describes it as ‘a delightful experience, a magical time of life, to wander in that delectable place, with its underground spring and its water trough, its hedges of wild honeysuckle and red campion underneath, and its cowslips…’
Her mother would take her and her brother the servant girl down to a particular meadow with clothes baskets. I have no idea how big they would be, I would guess like a hamper. They would take smaller baskets into the meadow and gather the flowers. As an adult looking, back, what an exquisite and perfect memory of childhood!
There were enough flowers for them to be picking them all morning and after lunch, all afternoon. In the evening they would pull the ‘peeps’ which I guess are the bell-like petal from the flower heads, throwing the pale green stalks and calyces on the kitchen floor. This would take the whole evening.
To make th wine first you have to measure the peeps of the flowers; to each peck (16 dry pints – what a quantity! the mother would use an old-fashioned wooden peck measure) to each peck add three gallons of spring water, and to each gallon of water add three pounds of sugar. Boil the water and sugar for an hour and then skim; while it is boiling add a few egg whites (I don’t know why, maybe to clarify the mixture) Strain it cool it, and while it is still warm add a little brewer’s yeast – it gives no idea of how much ‘a little’ is… in that quantity of liquid it could be a couple of ounces… but who knows? I guess the mother had made it from being a child, using her mother’s recipe, and goodness knows how many mothers before had made it!
Pour the peeps into the mixture, and the peel of two lemons for every gallon of liquid. Stir it ‘now and then’ for nine days and then pour it into a wooden barrel but leave the bung-hole open for a fortnight. Fasten the cork into the bung-hole with wire and after two months the wine can be bottled but it also says add a pint of best brandy to every three gallons of the wine. The best time for bottling was towards winter it says in the recipe… which means it must have been in the barrel for longer than two months…
Alison Uttley describes the wine as ‘yellow, resembling sherry, and tasted delicious, said those who drank it from the long pointed glasses which were my grandmother’s’.
Lois Elsden 