Extract of Elder Berries
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the juice
Place ripe elder berries in a jar and bake until soft.
Run the berries through a coarse cloth or sieve to extract the juice.
Reduce and store
Boil the juice until it thickens, reducing four or five pints to one.
Once thickened, store in pots and cover tightly.
Finish
When the mixture is warm, stir in the purified nitre with a glass stick or the end of a tobacco pipe.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Ripe elder berries
- Provide the juice that is reduced to form the thick base of the extract.
- Purified nitre (saltpetre)
- Stirred into the warm mixture as the added salt, shaping the final preparation.
The step that matters
Stirring in the purified nitre while the mixture is warm. Nitre is a dissolving salt, and it blends evenly only when the thickened juice is warm and not fully cooled. Adding it at the wrong temperature can leave it unevenly distributed, so the mixture should be stirred thoroughly until the salt is no longer visible.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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