The Hedgerow's Short Season

For a fortnight or so each year, usually from the last week of May into mid-June, the elder bushes along every lane, field margin and railway embankment in Britain do something remarkable. Flat plates of tiny creamy flowers open all at once, and the whole hedge smells of muscat grapes, green gooseberries and something faintly like a distillery. It is one of the most generous moments in the foraging calendar, and elderflower cordial is the finest thing you can make from it.

It costs almost nothing: a few kilos of sugar, a couple of lemons, a small bag of citric acid and half an hour of pleasant work in the sunshine. A day later you have several bottles of the most summery drink in the country, sharp, floral and completely unlike anything you can buy. Diluted with cold water or fizzy water over ice, it is the taste of a warm afternoon in a garden.

Picking Well: What to Look For

Elder (Sambucus nigra) is easy to know once you have met it properly. It is a shrub or small tree with grey, corky, often leaning stems, opposite pairs of pinnate leaves, and those large flat-topped heads of tiny white flowers. Identification matters, because while the flowers and the later berries are good to eat, the leaves, bark and roots are not. Nothing else common in a British hedgerow carries that particular creamy, flat-headed flower with that heavy scent.

Pick on a dry morning once the dew has lifted, ideally between ten and midday. Flowers gathered wet or after rain lose much of their perfume and spoil far faster. Choose heads where the buds are only just opening — these are the most fragrant and hold their scent longest. Leave anything going brown at the edges, and walk a good field's width away from busy roads, where verges collect grit and exhaust. Avoid low branches at nose height along well-used dog-walking paths.

• Take a basket or a large paper bag; plastic makes the heads sweat and turn brown.
• Snap each head off just below the flowers and leave the woody stems on the bush.
• Never strip a bush. Leave at least half the heads — they become elderberries in September.
• Twenty to twenty-five good heads will make a decent batch of cordial.

Quantities That Actually Work

This is a reliable, well-tested ratio. You will need 20–25 elderflower heads, 1.5kg granulated sugar, 2 unwaxed lemons, 1 unwaxed orange (optional), 40g citric acid and 1.5 litres of water.

Citric acid is the one thing you may have to buy rather than gather. It is sold in homebrew shops, some pharmacies and plenty of online grocers, and it does two jobs: it sharpens the flavour so the cordial tastes bright rather than merely sweet, and it helps preserve the bottles. If you cannot get hold of any, add the juice of an extra lemon instead and keep the cordial in the fridge, using it within a fortnight.

Steeping and Straining

Bring the water to the boil in a large pan, add the sugar and stir until it has completely dissolved, then take it off the heat. Pare the zest from the lemons and orange in wide strips, avoiding the white pith, and slice the fruit. Put the elderflowers, zest, sliced fruit and citric acid into a large food-grade bucket or bowl and pour the hot syrup over them.

Cover with a clean tea towel and leave somewhere cool for twenty-four hours, and up to forty-eight. Stir once or twice. Taste it after a day: if it is still just sweet water, give it another night; if it already tastes floral and faintly sharp, strain it. Left much beyond two days the infusion goes dull and can turn unpleasantly bitter.

Line a colander with clean muslin or a new cloth and set it over a large jug or pan. Ladle the mixture in and let it drip through for twenty minutes. Do not squeeze the flowers — press the fruit gently if you like, but squeezing the blossom releases bitterness.

Bottling, Keeping and Pouring

Funnel the cordial into sterilised bottles. Plastic screw-top bottles are ideal if you plan to freeze it, and you should leave a couple of centimetres of headroom for expansion. Kept in the fridge, the cordial is good for four to six weeks; in a cool, dark cupboard, several months; in the freezer, a year. If a bottle starts fizzing or smells vinous, it is fermenting — use it up quickly or pour it away.

To drink, dilute roughly one part cordial to five parts water, still or sparkling, over plenty of ice with a slice of lemon and a sprig of mint. It is also excellent with gin, a spoonful in a glass of dry white wine or champagne, poured over vanilla ice cream, whisked through a gooseberry fool, or used to sharpen a summer salad dressing.

A Few Variations Worth Trying

• A handful of mint leaves added for the last two hours of steeping.
• A thumb of fresh root ginger, sliced, simmered in the syrup before it is poured over.
• One lime in place of a lemon for a sharper, more aromatic note.
• Two sticks of rhubarb chopped into the bucket for a pinker, tarter cordial.

Make more than you think you need. Elderflower season is short, and a bottle of your own cordial in November, poured over ice on a grey evening, is a small and very specific kind of holiday.