Home › Wines, Champagne and Doctoring › Pokeberries and Elderberries
Pokeberries and Elderberries
Huckleberry Juice.
This is a fine Port wine coloring, as well as bouquet. and may be prepared from either fresh or dried berries, but the former are the best. The fresh berries are fermented and prepared the same as elderberries. (See "Recipe No. 9.") When the berries are dry they should be put in a copper kettle, tinned inside, and covered with water: let them soften by a slow and gentle heat, then put them into barrels, and to each ten gallons add one gallon alcohol, 95 per cent, in order to preserve them. Elderberry Juice.
At the time elderberries are gathered, make arrangements with the country people to supply the berries free from stems. Put them in casks, and cover them with spirit, 95 per cent, in the proportion of 1 gal. spirit to each 10 gals. of the berries. This will preserve the fruit, and you can use them as wanted.
Another method is to take the berries and crush and press all the juice from them, the same as you would grapes; then add spirit in the same proportion as directed above. For two other methods see "Recipes" Nos. 9 and 10. Elderberry juice is a splendid ingredient for coloring Port wine.
Mulberry Juice.
Mulberry juice is frequently used to color Port wine Prepare and treat the same as elderberries.
Pokeberries and Dwarf Elderberries Are sometimes used to color and flavor Port wine, and are prepared the same way as elderberries.
These are not table wines but colouring stocks — fruit juices preserved in high-proof spirit and blended into pale wine to pass it off as Port. Two of the four fruits named are poisonous, and the whole procedure belongs to the adulterator's trade rather than the kitchen.
- Pokeberries are toxicPhytolacca americana contains phytolaccatoxin and related saponins, concentrated in the seeds and root; the berries have caused serious poisoning, particularly in children. Crushing and pressing the fruit, as directed here for elderberries, releases seed contents directly into the juice, and alcohol does not destroy the compounds.
- Dwarf elder is a different plant from elderSambucus ebulus, the dwarf or danewort elder, is not the common elder of hedgerow cordials. Its berries are generally regarded as poisonous and have a long record of causing vomiting and diarrhoea; they are not safe raw or in cold infusion. What an American manual of this date meant by "dwarf elderberries" cannot be established with certainty.
- Raw elderberries and stemsEven true elderberry (Sambucus nigra or canadensis) contains cyanogenic glycosides in the raw fruit, and more in the stems, leaves and unripe berries. The insistence here on berries "free from stems" is the only nod to that, and the cold spirit method never heats the fruit at all.
- Preserving in 95 per cent spiritOne gallon of neutral spirit to ten of berries gives a rough infusion of well under 10 per cent alcohol by volume — enough to slow spoilage in a cool cellar, not enough to sterilise. Handling bulk 95 per cent ethanol is also a serious fire risk, and in many jurisdictions its sale is restricted.
- The tinned copper kettleCopper was tinned precisely because acidic fruit attacks bare copper and dissolves it into the food. Old tinning wears through; a nineteenth-century instruction to use tinned copper is not an endorsement of using copper today.
- What "doctoring" meantNothing here makes wine; it makes dye and "bouquet" to be added to something weaker and cheaper than what the label will claim.
- If you want elderberry wineUse a current recipe from a modern winemaking source, one that cooks the fruit and specifies quantities and temperatures. Do not adapt this page.
Port was among the most counterfeited wines of the nineteenth century, and elderberry was a notorious accomplice — the fruit is deeply staining, faintly tannic and cheap, and it turns thin red wine into something convincingly dark and heavy. The association is old enough that the Marquês de Pombal's 1750s reforms of the Douro are often said to have included orders to uproot elder trees in the region, a story repeated in many Port histories. Manuals like this one appear to have been written for the trade rather than the household: they assume a cooper's cellar, barrels by the ten gallons, and country suppliers bringing in berries. The casual inclusion of pokeberry and dwarf elder alongside huckleberry and mulberry shows how far the logic of colour could run ahead of any thought about what was being drunk — a reminder of why food adulteration law, in Britain and America alike, arrived when it did.