Blue Elderberries

Day 334: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Those words always chime in my head when I see blue elderberries.

When I was growing up, the red-fruited Elderberry was the only one you'd see in the cooler, damper climate of Snohomish County. It wasn't until I moved to southwest Washington that I saw blue Elderberry in abundance. My mother had always told me that the fruits of red Elderberry were poisonous, and while that is not exactly true (they must be cooked before eating), it kept me from nibbling on the ones in our neighbourhood. She also said (correctly) that black or blue Elderberries could be used for pie and jam. As a young housewife, I was tempted by the abundance of dusty blue berries within a short walk of our prairie property, and one afternoon set out with my husband to collect a five-gallon bucketful. Our mission was soon accomplished and we returned to the house for the next phase. That's when it all went south.

Y'see, for all of the fact that they grow in heavy clusters, each one of these berries is only about 5 mm. and consists largely of skin wrapped around hundreds of crunchy little seeds. After crushing the full five gallons and pressing (I might say "squeezing the hell out of") the mash through a jelly bag, the juice extracted would not have filled a quart jar. Perhaps this was the wrong way to approach the project; maybe I should have put them in a pot with some water and boiled them, but I was new to jam and jelly production then, and was following a "live off the land" recipe which I suspect had been written by someone who'd never actually tried to do it themselves. In the end, I chose the only reasonable option. I threw mash and juice onto the compost heap and put the cookbook in the darkest corner of my library.

Older and wiser now, I choose to leave blue Elderberries on the bush for the birdies. "Once bitten, twice shy" is another phrase which comes to mind.