Ripe Elderberries by debcll (CC on Flickr)

Next to Elderflower, Elderberry is my favorite cordial. I am otherwise quite partial to making jellies at the moment – not the desert type but the type you eat with meat, pie, veg and pretty much everything in our house. But unfortunately the Elder tree in our garden did not have enough berries in reach to make both so I chose cordial. I did however go hunting down the road and found loads of berries for dyeing – which you can read about on Historic Crafts. But I would never want to use these berries from bushes so close to the road for any food or drink.

The cordial recipe I used is pretty simple. You need to make a juice out of the berries using these measurements:

• 1 kg Elderberries
• ½ l Water
• 3 apples

I only had c. 300 g of Elderberries, which I therefore boiled with 150 ml water and 1 apple chopped up in bit pieces. I boiled this mixture till the berries burst and I then sieved the mixture to get the juice only.

Warning: Note that certain parts of the Elder tree are poisonous. However, ripe berries are not and in this recipe we are only using the juice. This is why I sieve the juice once more through a coffee filter/muslin cloth just to be sure that no other parts of the tree comes along for the ride.

For each liter of juice you will need:

• 375 – 500 g sugar
• 1 tsk citric acid or a squeeze of lemon

Mix the juice with the sugar and lemon/citric acid and give it a boil. Clean/disinfect your bottles and pour it in them.

I guess you can drink the cordial mixed with cold water but I always mix it with boiling water for a hot cordial which does wonders when you are feeling a bit under the weather.

After having to throw away my last batch of fruit liqueur in December, because it had gone moldy, I was quite distraught. The problem was that I had in my naivety added to much water to the mixture.
Anyway, not one to make the same mistake twice I decided to make some more and only add the minimum of sugar-water. This time I made: strawberry liqueur, gooseberry liqueur, redcurrant liqueur and licorice liqueur. The recipe is as follows for the fruit liqueur:

1. Clean the fruit .
2. Buy some cheap vodka (yes they will look strangely at you in the off-license when you ask for three bottles of their cheapest vodka).
3. Add the fruit to a jar/bottle and cover with vodka.
4. Leave in cool place for about a week or if you forget it just leave it longer.
5. Filter the fruit of with a sieve and then filter the now coloured liquid with a coffee filter (or piece of muslin cloth) just to remove bits and pieces.
6. Mix some sugar into boiling water (whatever way suits you). Probably about 200-250g sugar to 1 liter of water like in the original Lemoncello recipe. Add the sugar-water to the vodka at the rate of 2 vodka to 1 sugar-water. Just enough to make the mixture a little sweet and not pure vodka. But not so much that it goes moldy after a couple of months. Of course you can also drink it fast and then you won’t encounter this problem.
7. Leave it for about a month to settle and then enjoy!

Then what I do is take a jam jar and put the spices in it together with a bit of left over juice and store it in the fridge. Then when I next want some I just pop this into the pan and fill up with juice. This time around it should be enough to just warm it up and put the spices back into the jar since a bit of the juice has already been soaking for a while.

Enjoy!

Warning though: do not let the jam jar with spices stay in your fridge till June next year – it is pretty nasty to clean. I talk from experience.

So now I have decided to stick to the original Lemoncello recipe. Unfortunately, I could not get hold of un-waxed organic lemons before Christmas so this batch is with limes instead. Smells good though!
Hope this works and I get a wonderful Limecello out of it.

Note: with the citric fruit liqueurs I have discovered that the longer they get to stand around for the better they become. Some of them taste really soapy until they are about a year old.

Ingredients

• Depending on the the type of fruit, peel either the skin of 3-4 citric fruits (no white stuff) and the juice of one of these or get a bowl full or berries
• 3/4 L of Vodka
• 1 L Water
• 200-250 g sugar

Process

1. Leave the fruit in the vodka for around 3-4 days
2. Boil the sugar and water to mix and let cool
3. Filter the two liquids together and leave around for a month or two before drinking it