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Elder-Flavoured Ale
Allow a bushel of the berries to a cask of ale and eight ounces each of cinnamon, candied lemon or orange peel, nutmeg, mace, cloves, and ginger.
ELDERBERRY CATSUP (For Fish or Flavouring Meat Sauces) Place a gallon of ripe berries in a jar and pour over them one gallon boiling vinegar, letting stand in this over night on back of warm stove. In the morning strain and place the vinegar in preserving kettle to heat. Crush and rub berries through sieve and add to the vinegar a teaspoon each of grated nutmeg, clove and cinnamon, one-half teaspoon each salt and ginger, and two blades of mace. Boil for ten minutes, then bottle (spice and all) while hot. Let stand five or six weeks, then strain; re-heat to boiling point and re-bottle.
Two elder recipes run together here: a spiced ale and an elderberry vinegar catsup in the old English style. The catsup is the practical one; the ale is a note rather than a procedure.
- Cook the berries, never use them rawRaw and underripe elderberries, along with stems, leaves and green stalk fragments, contain cyanogenic glycosides that cause nausea and vomiting. Strip the berries from every scrap of stem, use only fully ripe fruit, and rely on the boiling vinegar and the ten-minute boil in the catsup. The ale recipe, which adds raw fruit to a cask, has no heat step at all.
- A bushel and a caskA bushel of elderberries is about 8 dry gallons, roughly 35 litres of loose fruit. "A cask of ale" is genuinely ambiguous: a firkin is 9 imperial gallons, a kilderkin 18, a barrel 36. Without knowing which, the berry-to-ale ratio cannot be reconstructed, and eight ounces each of six spices only makes sense at the larger end.
- Blades of maceA blade is one whole piece of the lacy aril, not a measured spoonful. Two blades is somewhere in the region of a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace, depending on the size of the blades; whole blades are preferable here in any case, since the spice is strained out later.
- VesselsUse glass, stoneware or stainless steel throughout. Hot vinegar attacks copper, brass and bare iron, and a "preserving kettle" of the period might well be copper or brass. Enamel-lined or stainless is the modern equivalent.
- Back of a warm stoveThis is the cool end of a wood range, holding somewhere around blood heat overnight. Covering the jar and leaving it at room temperature overnight does the same job of extracting colour and flavour.
- The five-week standThe long rest is a flavour step, not a preservation step; the acidity of the vinegar is what keeps it. Bottle into clean, hot sterilised bottles, cap tightly, and store in a cool dark place. Discard anything that shows mould or a slimy film rather than reboiling it.
- YieldA gallon of vinegar plus the berry pulp starts out at around 16 cups, and the finished, twice-strained catsup will be somewhat less than that once the solids are taken out. It is a thin, dark, sharp sauce meant to be spooned over fish or stirred into a gravy, not a thick tomato-style ketchup.
Elderberry catsup belongs to the long era before "ketchup" meant tomatoes, when the word covered any thin, dark, keeping sauce built on vinegar or brine and used as a seasoning for fish, gravies and made dishes. Mushroom, walnut and oyster catsups were its close relatives, and elderberry was the hedgerow version, made in September when the fruit hung heavy and cost nothing. The closest named ancestor is pontack sauce, an elderberry-and-vinegar condiment generally traced to seventeenth-century England and often said to be named for Pontack's Head, a London tavern kept by the son of a Bordeaux wine family; recipes for it circulated in English manuscript books for two hundred years. The spiced ale that opens the page reflects the same thrift: elder was a plant nobody planted and everybody used, for wine, for vinegar, for colouring thin port, and for pushing a weak cask of ale into something worth drinking at the turn of the year.