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Rob of Elder
Boil the juice of elderberries with spices; one quart of juice to one tablespoon each of cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. At the end of a half hour strain and add one-half pound loaf sugar. Boil and skim again. Let cool, add a half-pint of "fourth" brandy, and bottle. Or first make a heavy syrup of juice and sugar, then spice lightly with clove alone. Seal while hot.
SYRUP OF ROB OF ELDER (For Coughs) To a pint of juice from elderberries add a pint of molasses and boil twenty minutes, stirring all the while. When quite cold add three-fourths teacup of brandy for each quart.
ELDERBERRY WINE No. I Strain the juice of crushed berries, adding for six quarts of juice a half-gallon of water. Use three pounds of sugar to each gallon of the liquid. Let ferment in a cask or open earthen jar, filling up as it evaporates. When fermentation ceases stop well and set aside for eight months before racking off.
ELDERBERRY WINE No. 2 (Spiced) Boil five gallons elderberries with same amount of rainwater. Strain and add twenty-three pounds white sugar with four ounces red (or crude) tartar and to each gallon allow a dessertspoon of strong yeast. Add one-half ounce each of ginger, nutmeg, mace, and cloves with one and a half ounces bitter almonds. Let ferment and when this is over close cask tight, racking it off later at convenience. ELDER BLOSSOM WINE (Home-brewed Frontignac) Allow a gallon of water to each quart of stripped flowers, and to each gallon of water three pounds of sugar. Make a good syrup of sugar and water, skimming well, and pouring while boiling over the flowers. To each gallon of this liquor add the juice of one lemon and a heaping dessertspoon of "home-brewed hop-yeast," stirring thoroughly. Place in wooden or earthen receptacle, covered with a heavy cloth, and let ferment three days. Then strain and add the beaten white of one egg, stirring well through the liquid. Allow for each gallon of wine a little over a pound of raisins, chopping them and placing on the bottom of the cask. On them pour the wine; close the bung, and in six months it will be found ready for use.
This is a cluster of elder preparations from a period when the elder was treated as a home pharmacy as much as a fruit. Several of them cannot be made safely today, and the reasons are specific rather than general.
- Bitter almonds in Wine No. 2One and a half ounces of bitter almonds is the flat stopper here. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted; the dose in an unheated ferment is not controlled by anything in this method. Their sale is restricted in the United States for exactly this reason, and no substitution rescues the recipe as written.
- Raw elderberry juiceWine No. 1 ferments juice that is never boiled. Raw elder fruit, and any stem, leaf or unripe berry that rides along with it, carries cyanogenic glycosides that cause nausea, vomiting and cramping. The rob and the cough syrup boil their juice, which is why those two were the safer members of the family; the wine does not.
- Stems and green fruitThe instruction to "crush the berries" leaves it to the cook to separate fruit from stem. Elder stems, leaves and unripe berries contain cyanogenic glycosides, and a hastily picked or roughly crushed batch may carry them into the juice.
- Uncontrolled fermentationOpen earthen jars, rainwater, and "home-brewed hop-yeast" mean an undefined microbial population working for eight months. There is no acidity check, no sanitation step and no measured yeast strain. A current, tested winemaking procedure should be used if you want elder wine.
- "Fourth" brandyAn old trade grade whose modern equivalent is not settled. There is no reliable conversion, so treat the alcohol content of the finished rob as unknown.
- RainwaterWine No. 2 calls for five gallons of it as a matter of course, boiled with the berries. Roof-collected water in a period of coal smoke and untreated surfaces would not be considered potable by present standards.
- Loaf sugar and crude tartarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is its descendant. "Red or crude tartar" is unrefined argol, the crust from a wine cask, sold today in purified form as cream of tartar.
Rob comes through medieval Latin from the Arabic rubb, a fruit juice boiled down with sugar to a thick keeping syrup, and it entered English herbals as a dosage form rather than a dessert. Rob of elder was one of the standard domestic remedies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, kept in the cupboard against winter coughs and colds, which is why the second entry here is labelled outright as a medicine and stiffened with molasses and brandy. The elder itself earned its place in the yard by being useful at every stage: the flat cream umbels of blossom in early summer, the black fruit in autumn. The blossom wine is called "home-brewed Frontignac" because the muscat wines of Frontignan in the Languedoc were the fashionable sweet imports of the day, and elderflower's musky perfume was generally held to imitate them closely enough for a household that could not buy the real thing. Bitter almonds appear in the spiced wine for the same reason they appear in ratafias and macaroons of the period: they supplied the almond-and-marzipan note now got from benzaldehyde flavouring.