Dawn's blog: flädersaft - elderflower cordial

This morning we went out into the yard to pick flowers from the elderflower tree and make cordial! If you don't know what that is, it's a sort of juice syrup that you blend with water to make a drink. It lasts a long time on the shelf or in the fridge and is really popular here in Sweden, you can make it (or buy it made from) strawberries, raspberries, oranges, sloanberries, rhubarb ... well pretty much anything!

Anyhoo, although I think they have elderflower cordial in England too, to me it seems like the most Swedish thing ever! And people have been making it for generations! We used a recipe from recepten.nu but they are all more or less the same, if you have a swedish cookbook there will definitely be a recipe in there! Here's a look at the steps involved:

First collect your flower clusters, we used this pretty basket that's usually used for mushroom picking. Most recipes call for 30-40 flower clusters per 2 litres of water.

When you bring your flowers inside you can lay them out on a white tea towel and let them sit for fifteen minutes or so, this gives any little bugs that have been hanging out inside the blossoms time and opportunity to climb out. Then rinse them well!

Meanwhile you can cook up 2 litres of water with 2 kg of sugar (it feels so wild to empty a whole 2kg bag of sugar into the pot! That's what you need to preserve the saft and make it tasty and syrupy, though).