Elderberry Whine

Sambucus cerulea, aka S. nigra ssp. caerulea; S. mexicana; S. canadensis

One year I made a killer wine from elderberries (no, not the Arsenic & Old Lace variety). We weren't after anybody's pension, my grannie's was so minuscule, we lived below the poverty belt, but elderberries do contain "just a pinch" of cyanide, or rather, a cyanide inducing glycoside. My grannie said that during the Prohibition, the ladies of the parish brewed a sacramental wine (or  was it a cordial?) out of elderberries for the priests. I suppose that's what gave me the idea to make wine out of elderberries.

One year I became obsessed with brewing—someone had given me a homesteading cookbook for my birthday, and that year I made wine from everything I could think of—blackberries, apple juice, cranberry juice, huckleberries, and elderberries. 

Not enough tannin? I added a handful of tea leaves—Irish Breakfast. Not acidic enough? Lemons did the trick. The huckleberries and elderberry wines were the most successful of my home brews because they didn't need adulteration. They fermented just fine.

In those days, I didn't like booze, I was 19, as there were far too many alcoholics in the family, so my grandmother was the official guinea-pig, sipping each variety from an old scuffed shot-glass, and giving her nod of approval. She didn't die, so I knew my fruit wines were safe to drink.

A few years later, I found some abandoned bottles of my homebrew on the back porch toilet that we'd missed. Or rather, that my Uncle John Ritter had missed. One fall, while chopping winter wood, my aunt's husband discovered my hooch stash and drank his way through it. And lived. The hangover was not recorded. I was furious.

I brought a bottle of my huckleberry-elderberry blend wine to a regional French Culture class at Sonoma State—painter Marguerite Pendergast, (née Thomas) who, as a child, spent summers in France, taught these great off-campus weekend classes—we'd learn about folklore and cuisine. It was really an excuse to eat and drink ourselves silly. It was also the 1970s. Everyone said that it was like a dry Pinot Noir. There were hangovers, yes, but nobody croaked.
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Note bene: Be careful when making juice as the stems and leaves are poisonous. We never worried about eating the tiny pedicels (apparently they don’t contain much by way of glycosides. But it could also be that our native West Marin elders had less glycoside (which metabolizes into cyanide), or maybe you have to eat a lot of raw berries to get sick from elderberries. Cooking destroys the toxin.

About that Arsenic & Old Lace—the little old ladies used elderflowers to spike their wine, not the berries. Italian Sambuco is also elderflower flavored. So clearly, one can eat a few tiny stems/pedicels and get away with it.

I used pick elderberries from the back of my horse—she was the right height. There was a stand of trees at the Y junction where Barranca Creek created a dry island from a drainage arroyo at Stone's driveway, below Mimi's house, where we used to play and make forts in the bushes. Elder trees prefer damp areas, along creeks and ditches. When the berries are ripe, you can't miss 'em. Like clusters of the sky hanging from the branches.

I'd pop a cluster of berries in my mouth and then pluck the glaucous dusted berries from the stems. My grannie said the waxy blue bloom, an insect deterrent, was wild yeast. You could wipe it off and the berry was the size of a shiny black woodrat's eye.

Elderberries tasted astringent and vaguely bitter, it's an acquired taste. But it does whet the appetite. Good for when you're thirsty and far from home. We never drank from the creek, I did that once and got sick. But springs were fine as long as the cows and deer didn't get into them.

This was back in the days before bottled water. Nobody madly "hydrated" themselves the minute they stepped outside the way we do now—all this eight glasses of water a day nonsense is a diposmaniac's wet obsession. We went all day without water and drank when we were thirsty. Elderberries were a good late summer thirst quencher. That said, I do recommend spitting out the seeds.

I never got drunk off the berries or fell off my horse—the way the birds do after a pyracantha berry binge. Not that the birds fell off horses, but the orange-ass towhees and robins would get right-smashed and then fly into our front windows like kamakazi pilots.

We'd pick the birds up and hold them in the hollow of our hands until they recovered. The larger birds often broke their necks but the towhees bounced off the windows like ping-pong balls and the cats would lay in wait. So it was always a race. My grannie liked the towhees, they liked her, they'd gather at her feet in the mornings.

My grannie battered and fried the elderflowers. So we definitely ate a few tiny stems/pedicels and didn't die. Heat renders the toxin inert. I wouldn't recommend eating too many though as the toxin is most potent in the stems, roots, and leaves.

Elderberry flour fritters tasted vaguely green, like deep pools in summer. It was really an excuse to eat pancakes at night, she'd egg-batter the flowers still on their umbels and fry them in butter and we'd eat them with thick-thick brown sugar syrup that she kept in a little lidded enamel cup on the back of the stove. The hob, she called it. She battered and fried squash blossoms too—they tasted like the errant feathers of the sun.

We also made flutes (or tried to) from the hollow stems of the elder tree—drooling over the mouthpiece for hours on end and never getting a squeak, let alone, a note out of them. Didn't die from that either. Or blue lips. So much for my woodwind music career. Luckily, the toxins were no longer potent in the dead wood.

We used to eat elderberries lasciviously in front of the seashore-bound tourists who stopped at Mr. Lacy's Lagunitas Store. They would freak out and scream, "They're poisonous! They're poisonous!" Shielding their children's eyes from us, admonishing them to never eat wild berries.

We'd laugh and smear the dark juice on our faces. Hold our stigmatad hands up, as if resurrected from the dead, like threadbare goddesses on horseback, and then smile down upon them beatifically with purple-stained teeth.

Just don't eat the red, or green ones—ever. They’ll make you sick. Spit out the seeds too.

 

Some medieval recipes (it also occurred to me that European elderberries might be a little more toxic in the raw state than our west coast species.)

Sambocade 1.

Take and make a Crust in a trape. & take a cruddes and wryng out þe wheyze. and drawe hem þurgh a straynour and put in þe straynour crustes. do þerto sugur the þridde part & somdel 2 whyte of Ayrenn. & shake þerin blomes of elren 3. & bake it up with curose 4 & messe it forth.

1 Sambucade. As made of the Sambucus, or Elder.
2 Somdel. Some.
3 Blom of Elren. Elder flowers.
4 curose. (Not defined, but I found this: Corose. curiously. perhaps from cure, to cook, Chaucer has corouse, curious. Cruddes are curds. Messe is a dish, as in a serving from what I can tell. —from The Forme of Cury, 1390 (for Richard II), edited by Samuel Pegge, in 1780. And Cury does not mean curry, but cookery, as in curing meat.


To make Elder Vinegar.

Gather the flowers of Elder, pick them very clean, and dry them in the Sun on a gentle heat, and take to every quart of Vinegar a good handfull of flowers and let it stand to Sun a fortnight, then strain the Vinegar from the flowers, and put it into the barrell againe, and when you draw a quart of Vinegar, draw a quart of water, and put it into the Barrell luke warme. 

To make good Vinegar. 

Take one strike of Malt, and one of Rye ground, and mash them together, and take (if they be good) three pound of Hops, if not four pound; make two Hogs-heads of the best of that Malt and Rye, then lay the Hogs-head where the Sunne may have power over them, and when it is ready to Tun, fill your hogs-heads where they lye, then let them purge cleer and cover them with two flate stones, and within a week after when you bake, take two wheat loaves hot out of the Oven, and put into each hogs-head a loaf, you must use this foure times, you must brew this in Aprill, and let it stand till June, then draw them clearer, then wash the Hogs-heads cleane, and put the beer in again; if you will have it Rose-vinegar, you must put in a strike and a half of Roses; if Elder-vinegar, a peck of the flowers; if you will have it white, put no thing in it after it is drawn, and so let it stand till Michaelmas; if you will have it coloured red, take four gallons of strong Ale as you can get, and Elder berries picked a few full clear, and put them in your pan with the Ale, set them ouer the fire till you guesse that a pottle is wasted, then take if off the fire, and let it stand till it be store cold, and the next day strain it into the Hogs-head, then lay them in a Cellar or buttery which you please.

—from THE COMPLEAT COOK: Expertly prescribing the most ready wayes, whether Italian, Spanish, or French, for dressing of Flesh and Fish, &c. LONDON, 1658. Note: This book is part of the W. M. volume The Queens Closet Opened.