Elderflower
There is a moment, somewhere in the last week of May, when the lanes of Northern Europe seem to foam at the edges. You notice it without quite registering it at first — a froth of cream-white in the hedgerows, suspended on a shrub that nobody seems to have planted and nobody quite owns. Then the smell catches you: muscaty, honeyed, slightly feline if you put your nose too close, and unmistakably of a particular two weeks in the year. Elderflower. It is one of those ingredients that exists almost entirely outside the supermarket. You can buy the cordial in bottles, and you can sometimes find the dried flowers in a Polish grocery, but the flower itself — the umbel, that flat pale lacework of tiny stars — you have to go and find. Which is exactly why every culture that lives within a hedgerow of Sambucus nigra has has its own private grammar of what to do with it once you have harvested some. In Britain the answer is cordial. Always cordial. Recipes vary in their proportions of s...
