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Elderberry Brandy
Pick the berries when fully ripe. Have ready a press for drawing off the juice, and four hair-cloths somewhat broader than the press; put one layer of berries above another, having a hair-cloth between each layer, which must be laid very thin and pressed a little at first, and then more, till the press be drawn as close as possible. Now take out the berries, and press all the rest in like manner. Next take the pressed berries, break out all the lumps, put them into an open-headed vessel, and add as much liquor as will just cover them. Let them infuse for seven or eight days, then put the juice first drawn into a cask proper for it to be kept in, and add two gallons of malt spirits to every twenty gallons of elder-juice, which will effectually preserve it from becoming sour for two years at least. A little sugar and a few cloves make a great improvement in the brandy.
This is not brandy in the distilled sense but raw elderberry juice fortified with grain spirit, made in barrel quantities. Several features of the method put it outside what can be recommended today.
- Raw elder juice is the central problemRaw elder juice is the main concern -- elder leaves, stems, unripe berries and seeds contain cyanogenic glycosides that can release hydrogen cyanide, and raw berry juice has been implicated in episodes of vomiting and cramping attributed to lectins; ripe pulp carries much less than the green parts. Cooking is the usual precaution and modern elderberry preparations are generally cooked. This recipe applies no heat at all, so the juice goes into the cask raw.
- Stems and green fruit go into the pressStems and green fruit may reach the press -- the recipe says to pick the berries when fully ripe, but it never describes stripping them from the stalks, and stem tissue carries markedly more of the toxic glycoside than ripe pulp. There is no step here that removes or neutralises it.
- An eight-day open infusionThe pressed marc is steeped in an open-headed vessel for seven or eight days with only enough liquid to cover. That is an uncontrolled ferment at ambient temperature with no measured acidity, no sulphite and no starter culture, which is how spoilage organisms and acetic bacteria take hold.
- "As much liquor as will just cover them"The word is unspecified. It may mean water, weak spirit or the first-run juice, and the strength of the finished liquid depends entirely on which. Nothing in the text allows the alcohol content to be calculated.
- The preservation claim does not holdTwo gallons of malt spirits to twenty gallons of juice works out to roughly a tenth by volume. Even if the spirit were high proof, that dilutes to well under the level at which alcohol reliably arrests microbial growth, so the promise of two years without souring is not sound.
- Malt spiritsA plain grain spirit rather than anything sold today as brandy, closer in character to unaged whisky.
- ScaleTwenty gallons of juice implies a very large quantity of fruit and a cooper's cask. This was farm or large-household production, not a kitchen batch.
- If you want elderberry cordialUse a current recipe that cooks the fruit and gives measured quantities. Do not adapt the timings or proportions above.
Elder grew freely in hedgerows and churchyards in Britain, cost nothing, and cropped heavily, which made it a common raw material of cottage wine-making and of domestic medicine well into the nineteenth century; hot elderberry wine was a common winter remedy for chills long before anyone measured its vitamin content. The name "brandy" here may reflect a looser older usage in which a spirit-strengthened fruit liquor might be so called. Adding a proportion of spirit to keep a fruit wine from turning was a recognised practice rather than a flourish, and the equipment described — the press, the four hair-cloths laid between layers of fruit — is of the same kind used for cider and perry. Elder was also long known to be purgative in quantity, which is why so many traditional uses cook it first; that knowledge is old, even if the chemistry behind it is not.