ELDERFLOWER CORDIAL

Diana Henry reveals how to extend summer’s elderflower season with three new recipes

- Diana Henry

Elderflower season may be over, but if you have a bottle of the cordial in the cupboard, you can keep the flavour going all year long. Along with strawberries, elderflower is the smell of English summertime. It’s floral, but also ‘green’ (it’s enhanced by lime juice) and has a whiff of nettles and gooseberries. Many fragrant ingredients can be rather sickly, but not elderflower. I collect blossoms every year to make cordial. As soon as I realised there were loads of elder trees near my home, I was out with the secateurs. The individual flowers look like tiny stars; en masse, they create huge, frothy clouds of blossom. There are few activities more bucolic than an afternoon spent picking elderflowers. I always end up feeling like a character in a Mary Wesley novel.

You can, of course, fall back on shop-bought elderflower cordial. I never manage to make enough for the whole year, so I supplement my supply. It used to be a rather recherché ingredient, but no longer. Commercial cordials vary in strength, though (especially supermarket own-label varieties), so do bear that in mind. I always use Bottlegreen, and the following recipes have been tested using it.

A jug of apple juice mixed with elderflower cordial, sparkling water and sliced limes is one of the best drinks for spring and summer, but once raspberries come into season, I make something even better: whizz raspberries in a food processor, then sieve and mix with elderflower cordial and sparkling water, adding lemon juice and caster sugar to taste. Throw in lots of ice and you have a gloriously scarlet raspberry and elderflower ‘lemonade’.