LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM

ELDERBERRY

By Barbara Tatham Johnson

Gilbert White wrote in his journal on June 24, 1772: “When the elder blows summer is established.” The elderberry shrubs beside our stream blossom or “blow” in July, somewhat later than in the English countryside, but the flowering is as much a significance of summer’s arrival here as it is across the Atlantic. On a January night, as winter whips and rages across the meadow and the woods bellow with the voice of a mighty northwest wind, it is delightful to nestle in my rocker in front of a merry woodstove fire to sip a fruity elderberry bounce and think about the warmth and sun of the summer to come. Anticipating the ripe elder fruit that will be ready to pick in late August and early September is a pleasure, for I can be sure of this fruit harvest. The black elderberry crop never fails. The shrubs grow best in places where their “feet are wet,” streamside, along roadside ditches and the edges of meadows. In a droughty summer, I may have to beat thirsty birds to the ripe fruit, even cover some shrubs to allow the berries to achieve their ebony black ripeness, but the elderberry will flower and bear fruit.

Called “the medicine cabinet of the country people,” all the components of the elderberry plant—leaves, flowers, fruit, bark, stems, pith, and roots—contain something to benefit humankind. Modern medical research finds that properties of the elder flowers and berries eliminate a flu virus’s ability to enter the body’s cells and reproduce. The berries are rich in vitamin C and contain calcium, iron, and potassium.

From time beyond memory, magic, myth, and tradition have gathered about the elderberry and endowed it with a psychic influence that in some parts of the world rivals its medicinal value. The belief that the elder was the wood on which Jesus was crucified and that Judas hanged himself from an elder branch made the plant a symbol of grief and death. Mrs. Grieve writes in A Modern Herbal, “an old custom among gypsies forbade them using [elder] wood to kindle their campfires, and gleaners of firewood formerly would look carefully through the faggots lest a stick of elder should have found its way into the bundle...one sometimes comes across a hedge-cutter who cannot bring himself to molest the rampant growth of its spreading branches for fear of being pursued by ill-luck.” In Europe, rural folk asked permission of dryads and witches for the use of elder.

Native Americans’ respect for the elderberry’s strong medicine may have included legend and magic, but in my limited research, I have not read of that. Native Americans did utilize many of the medicinal benefits of elderberry, Sambucus canadensis, as Europeans did the identical attributes of their elderberry variety, Sambucus nigra. Bark, leaves, and stems provided ointments and poultices for headaches, wounds, and bruises. Powerful purges and diuretics were brewed from the inner bark and roots. Elderberry leaves crushed or attached to a hat or head ornament repelled flies and gnats. Hollowed stems—the soft pith is easily poked out—provided blow guns, tubes to coax coals into flame with a breath, and flutes and pipes to make music.

My interest in the black elderberry began almost forty years ago when my mother, a city girl, came to live with me, my husband, and our three sons in the countryside outside Morgantown, West Virginia. She was as delighted as I was with the variety and abundance of wild fruits growing in the fields and along the lanes and stream sides and with the possibilities of jams, jellies, pies, cobblers, and crisps made with fruit for only the cost of the enjoyable efforts of picking. Wild strawberries, black raspberries, and wineberries glistened in jars of red and purple in the pantry.

We noticed blue-black bundles of ripe fruit weighing the branches of shrubs that were unfamiliar to both of us as we drove about the country roads. Our neighbors assured us the fruit was edible yet bland in flavor, but the Certo pectin pamphlet’s instructions for making elderberry jelly called for a half cup of lemon juice, which, along with plenty of sugar, transformed the elderberry juice we prepared into an unusually tasty spread.

The elderberry harvest was bountiful, and we canned several quarts of plain juice. My mother scoured our cookbooks for other ways to use the juice and found a recipe for an elderberry cordial named “elderberry bounce.” A pint of French brandy added to a quart of elderberry juice that had been boiled with sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice into a thin fruit syrup and cooled proved to be a brightly fruity and warming night cap that we enjoyed during our evening chats. The bounce proved so delightful, in fact, that my mother bought a set of four small lead crystal goblets engraved by a local artisan with his interpretation of sprays of elder blow.

We chose not to expand our spirit making into elderberry wine, although the directions we found described a simple process. We were, after all, interested in immediate gratification after the effort to gather and prepare the fruit and too impatient for the extended waiting period for the elderberry juice, sugar, and yeast to work into the finished product. What could be quicker and easier than opening a quart jar of our canned elderberry juice and combining it with a pint of French brandy?

However, the information we gathered about elderberry wine was most interesting. A tasty cheering brew, at times it could be powerful. In a collection of folk recipes from the southern Appalachians in The Foxfire Book, we read the recollections of one Lawton Brooks about his elderberry winemaking efforts. “I got drunk on it—stayed drunk for a day or two. That was such a bad drunk that I’ve never drunk any more elderberry wine. It liked to have killed me.”

Elderberry wine contains natural medicinal benefits, a remedy for colds and flu, sore throats, and asthma as well as rheumatism. In Mrs. Grieve’s A Modern Herbal, we read that adding elderberry juice to port and red wines to make cheap pseudo-claret and Bordeaux was common practice for centuries in Britain and Europe. The usual ratio of three parts elderberry juice to one part wine or port caused such a loss of business for the Portuguese port makers that in the eighteenth century the cultivation of elderberry plants in Portugal was forbidden. The practice of adulterating wine and port with elderberry juice continued, however. In the late nineteenth century, an American sailor in Prague told a doctor that his bouts with intoxication from “old dark-red port” cured his rheumatic pains. The doctor investigated the properties of the elderberry-enhanced port and found that the natural antineuralgic qualities of the fruit juice provided relief from the pain of sciatica and other kinds of neuralgia.

Over time, our moves to other states interrupted our access to elderberries, but whenever we could we enjoyed elderberry jelly and bounce. I expanded my elderberry medicine chest to include elder flowers. The dried flowers may be used in lotions and skin treatments as well as providing relief from hemorrhoids. The flowers share the antiviral qualities of the berries. The many tiny five-petaled, creamy white flowers that form flat spreading platterlike clusters, some measuring six to eight inches across, seem to float amid the leafy spreading branches of elder shrubs in July. James Russell Lowell’s description of elder growth “foamed over with blossoms white as spray” seems an accurate if romantic portrayal.

As soon as the little starlike flowers open fully all across the blossom heads, I cut several from each shrub, leaving more to form berries and ripen in August. The flower cluster of the elder is divided into five large stems, a cyme in botanical terms, and resembles floral candelabra. These I set carefully on fine mesh screens in the dark airy garage attic to dry in several weeks into tiny ivory colored crumbles. I shake the dried flowers from their stems and store them in glass bottles in my dark pantry. When I feel cold or flu symptoms, I steep a tablespoon of dried elder flowers in a cup of boiling water for five minutes, strain into a heated mug, sweeten with a bit of honey and sip it at bedtime. The mild sweat and sound sleep the tea brings banishes the bug by morning most times.

When I was a child, I did not spend much time with my mother because of her health problems, and our companionable chats over a goblet of bounce over the years—she lived with us for twenty-eight years—reestablished the mother/daughter bond we had missed. I smile this evening as I remember an incident she recalled from her tomboy adventures and chuckle over recollections of her city-girl enthusiasms with happy country life discoveries. No elder branches fuel the dancing flames in the wood stove tonight, but there is more magic than medicine in the elder bounce I sip from a little glass goblet.

 

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