On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 00:49:23 +0100, "Mike Lyle"
wrote:

Phil L wrote:
Sacha wrote:
In the very faint hope that we actually get some sun before the
Longest Day is upon us and it's all downhill towards Christmas,
I'm passing on a delicious recipe a friend gave me last year:

90 heads of Elder flower, picked at mid-day

6 sliced lemons

9lbs. Preserving sugar (Caster will do but Preserving is better)

7.5 oz. Citric or Tartaric acid

Put all the ingredients into a large bowl or clean plastic
bucket.
Add 7.5 pints boiling water.

Stir night and day for 5 days. Strain, squeezing the lemons.
Put
into plastic bottles and deep freeze. Take out only when wanted,
and refrigerate as it won¹t keep out of the freezer for more than
5 to 7 days.

Dilute with water to taste.

This makes a very refreshing drink in hot weater.

Undiluted, it¹s also good on gooseberries or over fruit salad.

If you add a spoonfull of yeast it will also make a decent wine!
(if
you take away 7lbs of the sugar!)

Are you KIDDING? 90, read "ninety", like dude you mean, XC, figures
nine-uh zero I say again nine-uh zero, naw deg, neunzig,
quatre-vingts-dix, novanta, heads of elderflowers for two gallons of
wine? That will smell like three years' worth of cat pee soaked into
the carpet. About a pint of stripped elderflowers will flavour and
aromatise a gallon of strong sweet white wine for dessert use enough
to blow your socks off; I'd use max two heads for a gallon of
ordinary grape, whitecurrant, or gooseberry wine, and I wouldn't
leave them in very long, either. You don't apply the flowers till
_after_ the primary fermentation, whose bubbling would blow away most
of the aroma: pop them in there in a nylon stocking with a handful of
sterilized marbles (I know mine are.)

And modern preserving sugar is, indeed, inadvisable: the stuff
contains not so much citric acid as, if me soaked old grey cells do
not deceive me, pectin -- a sore destroyer of your wine's clarity,
and general irrelevancy to the domestic booze process. Use plain old
granulated cheapest: it's pure unwholesome C6H22O11 or something.
Check out my surname: we know this kind of shit in our family..

BUT Sacha's recipe was for elderflower cordial, as the subject line
says. It will be diluted, and needs to be stronger and sweeter.
Though I don't think I've ever used as much as 9lbs sugar to a gallon
of water. I've not counted heads or used 6 lemons either. Still, the
stronger the better. Just don't give it a chance to ferment as
happened to me once. The kitchen was like a war zone, but luckily it
happened early one morning while we were still in bed!

Pam in Bristol