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Elder-Flower Pancakes and Junket
The finest flowers of the elder blossoms, stripped, may be whipped lightly into pancakes or muffins just before baking, a half-cupful to each "batch" of ordinary quantity This gives both lightness and flavour. A plain junket should have added one-fourth part flowers to quantity of cream or milk used.
Two uses for elder blossom in one short entry: as a flavouring folded into batter, and as an infusion for junket. The instructions assume you already know how to make pancakes and junket, so the useful work here is in the flowers themselves.
- Strip the flowers properly"Stripped" means the tiny florets pulled or scissored free of every scrap of green stem, which carries the bitter, mildly toxic compounds found throughout elder wood and leaf. Hold the head over a bowl and comb the florets off with a fork; discard all stalk, however fine.
- Know your plantOnly elder (Sambucus nigra and its close relatives) is wanted. Several unrelated umbellifers with flat white flower heads growing in the same damp ground are seriously poisonous, so identify by the woody shrub, pithy stems and opposite compound leaves, not by the flower alone.
- "A batch of ordinary quantity"The book does not say. A household pancake batter of the period would typically run to about 2 cups flour with milk and eggs, or enough for a dozen muffins. A half-cup of loose florets in that volume is assertive but not overwhelming.
- Fold, do not whip"Whipped lightly" most likely means no more than stirring the florets in at the last moment, the way you would add blueberries; heavy beating after the flowers go in risks knocking out the lift the recipe promises.
- Griddle and ovenThe entry gives no temperatures. By modern practice: pancakes on a griddle at moderate heat, about 375F, so the florets colour without scorching; muffins at 400 to 425F for 18 to 20 minutes.
- The junket proportion"One-fourth part flowers" is by loose volume, not weight: about a half-cup of florets to 2 cups of milk. Warm the milk with the flowers to just under a simmer, steep 20 to 30 minutes off the heat, strain, then cool to about 110F before adding rennet, or the enzyme will be destroyed and the junket will never set.
- RennetJunket tablets are no longer a grocery staple; vegetarian or animal rennet from a cheesemaking supplier works, following the dose on the package. Once the rennet is stirred in, do not move the dish until it has set, or the curd breaks and weeps.
- YieldThe junket quantity above serves four in small cups. Use pasteurised milk and refrigerate the set junket; apart from the infusion step it is a warm-set dish rather than a cooked one.
Elder-flower has a long double life in English and American kitchens, valued both as a flavouring in its own right and as a cheap stand-in for muscat grape: cooks steeped the blossom in gooseberry preserves, vinegars, cordials and "elder-flower water" to borrow that faintly grapey muscatel scent. Junket, a milk set with rennet rather than eggs, was common invalid and nursery food in the nineteenth century because it needed no baking and was thought easy to digest, which makes it a natural vehicle for a delicate flavour that heat would drive off. The elder was in any case a double household crop, flowers in early summer and berries in autumn.