The particulars
Season
June–July
Picked
On dry, still mornings
Tastes of
Honey, lemon pith, muscat
Field notes
Elder is a hedgerow tree with no ambition to be anything else. It grows along the lanes and field edges around us, usually where a bird has left it, and for two weeks in June it is covered in flat, cream-coloured heads of blossom.
We pick on dry, still mornings when the pollen is at its heaviest, taking whole heads that have just opened and leaving anything that has started to brown. They are never washed; the pollen is the point. The baskets go to the shed within the hour, since elderflower turns from honeyed to something like cat in an afternoon.
The heads are shaken free of insects, stripped from the thicker stalks, and steeped in cold water with lemon for twenty-four hours. A very small amount of sea salt goes in at the end. It does for elderflower what it does for a tomato.
