Summer season Solstice Elderflowers (in Cape City)

Cape City’s summer time days are blazing and lengthy. They’re additionally dry and sometimes windy. The rain is available in winter. A hike via the aromatic fynbos on Desk Mountain—the Hoerikwaggo, which implies “mountain within the sea”—is important for anybody who loves crops. One other ritual for me, once I go to, is an elderflower hunt. The launched shrubs bloom for months in summer time. In New York I seek for their lacy blooms in early June. However within the greenbelts of Constantia, the Cape City suburb the place my mom lives, the flowers may be discovered from November via February. In direction of late summer time they provide what the Sambucus species within the Northeast by no means have: flowers and fruit on the similar time. For somebody enchanted by elder’s potential within the kitchen, it’s like Christmas (and the calendar would agree).

Images by Marie Viljoen.

4 Cape City summers in the past, at residence for 3 months with my mom after my father handed away, I found {that a} favourite elder shrub I used to go to, rising excessive on the Alphen Path, a verdant greenbelt following a tiny however regular stream referred to as the Diep River, bordering my dad and mom’ home, had been minimize down. In want of a therapeutic mission I begged native buddies to ship me intel about different elderflower places, and promised, in return, a bottle of the fermented elderflower cordial that I make with the tiny white flowers. A scorching tip delivered through WhatsApp (the South African messaging platform of selection) despatched me to an unfamiliar path bisecting a summer-dry wetland, and landed me in the midst of an elderflower motherlode. I picked and picked and picked.

Quickly, a big glass jar of elderflower cordial was in progress. The jar had housed cookies once I was little, in one other home, in one other province, and in one other century. Now it was  crammed with an alchemy of flowers, stirred every day on the kitchen desk within the cool gentle of the gauze-curtained sash home windows. The liquid hissed quietly to itself because the fermentation course of, fueled by wild yeasts, gained momentum.

Quickly, it was prepared, bottled and distributed, as promised, with simply sufficient left over to sip via that summer time.

A month later I returned to seek out the identical shrubs loaded—like a present for sorrowing foragers—with flowers, in addition to with fruit, inexperienced and fatly purple and ripe. The fruit is poisonous, uncooked, however compelling when cooked or fermented. The unripe elderberries are lacto-fermented and turn into elderberry capers. Syrups, sauces, and vinegar challenge from the ripe fruit.