Old Fashioned Elderberry Jelly
Preserving summer bounty and the memories

by Karen Kinnane

The recipe is easy:

We picked the berries that were a joy. The golden sun warmed us as we snapped off clusters of the largest, darkest purple berries and dropped them into the colorful plastic pails, filling the big buckets quickly as our fingers became stained with the deep purple juice. The best berries, the largest, darkest, most flavorful were growing in an abandoned barnyard from huge old bushes which were loaded with fruit.

Then we stripped the berries from the stems. This is seen as tremendous work by those who don't know this trick; they labor for hours pulling individual berries off the stems, becoming discouraged and purple stained in the process!

USE A FORK TO STRIP THE BERRIES QUICKLY AND EASILY!

If the berries are ripe, they willingly part from the stems and fall into the bowl as you rake them off with a dinner fork. Until a person learns this trick, elderberries often seem like more trouble than they are worth! With the fork, you can strip 15 or 20 pounds of fruit in a very short time.

Pick over the berries as you strip them and remove any leaves, green berries, sticks, or other foreign material. If the berries have a dusty "bloom" it is fine and you can ignore this, some varieties have a bloom, and some do not. Rinse the berries very gently in case there is dust from the pasture. Chop up a couple of green apples or crab apples, cores, seeds and all, in half inch dice and add to the berries before cooking. This is for added pectin to make the berries jell. We picked up these apples on the street from trees which belonged to no one but with fruit which anyone was welcome to harvest.

Fill the bottom of the dampfentsafter with water (like the bottom of a double boiler) and put the berries into the top section and mash them with a wooden masher. Cook over low heat for an hour or more. The gentle heat from the simmering water in the base will cause the elderberries to give up their juice. When the berries have given up their juice, the juice is drained off with the rubber hose which connects to the base of the upper pot. There is a clamp on this hose which keeps the juice in the pot until you open the clamp after FIRST guiding the end of the hose into a pot.

When we made elderberry jelly at my German Grandma's house, we did not have this pan. My Grandmother put the elderberries in a big enamel (non reactive) pot, and mashed them with a wooden masher, which I still use today. She put some apple cider or apple juice in the pan to start the berry cooking process and also for the pectin. Grandma would cook the elderberries for perhaps half an hour, stirring to break up the berries, and to release the juice.

The juice from the dampfentsafter does not need to be strained, it is pure. When you cook the berries like Grandma did, you would, at the end, take the three legged spider strainer (funnel shaped body) and line it with three layers of damp cheese cloth. The hot berries and the pulp were then transferred to the cloth lined spider strainer which was standing on its three spindly legs over a large bowl. The bag of berry pulp was allowed to drip for half an hour, with the hot, tart, rich, smell of the cooked elderberries hanging heavy in the kitchen air. We used to laugh over the stained fingers; it was a part of the process. At the end of half an hour, my Grandfather would twist the ends of the cheese cloth together to squeeze out more of the juice. There was a pointed wooden masher which was used to slide down into the funnel shaped strainer, to press out as much juice as possible.

If you want clear, non cloudy jelly, you don't squeeze the bag. We were interested in taste and volume, so we squeezed the bag of pulp.

You measure out a cup of sugar for each cup of juice, in a big kettle with tall sides. The sugary juice gets super heated when you cook, and you don't want spatters on your skin or a sticky purple mass on your stove top if things boil over a shallow pan.

Grandma cooked the jelly at a low boil until it reached the sheeting stage, that is, a few drops of jelly dribbled on a cool saucer "sheeted" or stuck, it did not run like grape juice would run. Once the jelly sheeted, it was poured immediately into hot, sterilized, dry jars. We used recycled jelly, jam, pickle and relish jars, left over World War II jelly jars whose lids had long ago gone into wartime scrap drives, and a few small juice tumblers. Grandma left 1/4" head space, and sealed the jars with liquefied paraffin ("kitchen wax" was purchased at the hardware store in a one pound block which looked exactly like a one pound box of four sticks of butter) while the jelly was still hot. Being lighter than the jelly, the paraffin pooled on top and formed an airtight seal with the sides of the jar. The paraffin was heated in a pot which was warmed in a larger pot full of warm water. YOU NEVER HEAT THE PARAFFIN OVER DIRECT HEAT AS IT IS FLAMMABLE.

Today you would use glass jelly jars with the two piece lids: metal rings and flat tops, sealing according to the manufacturers directions.

Ariane and Anna used the same recipe as my Grandmother's except that they cooked the apple bits with the berries. They also used modern, but recycled grocery jars, like pickle jars, jars from commercial jams, and jars donated by family. Anna filled the hot, sterilized, dry jars with the scalding elderberry jelly, replaced the original metal caps, and inverted the jars on a tea towel in the summer kitchen, and then covered them with another tea cloth, so a stray breeze would not cause the super hot jars to crack. Amazingly, most of the jars obligingly formed a seal with the rubber gasket at the top even though this was not the first use of these recycled jars. The few which did not make a good seal were stored in the refrigerator the next day and would be used first.

The finished jars of jelly were placed in the pantry. In this cool, dark spot, the elderberry jelly would remain good for a year or more, a welcome, wine sweet taste of summer on a cold winter morning.

This makes a wonderful juice as well!

Anna also cooked a batch of juice and bottled it for use as a drink during the winter. She mixes some of the viscous, dark ruby / purple juice with water for a tart soft drink which is loaded with vitamin C. It's delicious with late August lunch on the terrace where you're basking in the shade from the old stone house and barn. You eat wonderful German ham and cheese on crusty, chewy rolls, with strong, dark mustard, accompanied by sliced late tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden, washing the meal down with the elderberry water cocktail. What an experience!

After a jar of jelly was finished, Grandma washed the paraffin "lid" in the water with the dishes, and put it back in the small white enameled pot with the red enamel trim with the other "wax lids" and the kitchen paraffin which was left over from the jelly making. This pot was kept covered to keep the wax clean, and the wax was used over and over, the reheating to the liquid stage killing any germs which might have the temerity to lurk there.

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