HISTORICAL
Grinding the red elderberries into a paste
Our finished fruit leather was a dark purple with
a flexible nature and oily texture. Initially, the flavour
was nice but the aftertaste has a difficult-to-describe
pungency that I don’t like. We packaged and froze
the fruit leather in the hope that the flavour would
improve with storage, which wasn’t an unreasonable
suspicion given the pervasiveness of this practice
among First Nations.
Storage and Soaking
Besides storage, a few ethnographies also mention
soaking the cooked fruit in water. While working with
the Puyallup and Nisqually, Marian Smith noted that
after red elderberries were boiled they were “put into
loosely woven baskets which had been well lined with
maple leaves. The basket was carefully covered with
the same kind of leaves and submerged in a running
stream. It took about a month for the berries to cure
and be ready to eat. When finished they formed a thick
paste ‘as yellow as butter.’ After the basket was opened
it had to be kept in the water and the paste was used
regularly until it was gone.” Contrary to other ethnographies that ascribe marginal flavour to red elderberry,
Smith goes on to say “Elderberry paste was mixed with
other dried berries to heighten their flavor.”
Albert Reagan documented a similar method
of storing (or treating?) red elderberries among the
Hoh and Quileute: “The cooked product is wrapped
in skunk-cabbage leaves and buried in the muck in
some swampy place, to be dug up when needed.”
While cool temperatures and low oxidation rates in
submerged environments provide the most likely
explanation for this practice, it is conceivable that
water storage was a desirable means of leaching out
bad tasting constituents in the cooked berries, or
slightly fermenting the fruit.
Water storage of red elderberries was also
practiced in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.
According to elders interviewed by Nancy Turner
and Randy Bouchard, the Squamish also stored red
elderberries in water. The berries were cooked until
they formed a “molasses-like mass” and placed in
a special red cedar basket called tl’pat, which was
anchored underwater.
When the berries were needed, they were pulled
up, the required amount removed, and the remainder re-submerged. August Jack concisely describes
the process in a 1955 interview with Major Mathews:
“Elderberry put in sack, you know Indian sack; put
sack in creek so clean water run over them and keep
them fresh. By and by get sack out of creek, take some
berry out, put sack back again.” The Skagit similarly
employed this method, as described by McCormick
Collins: “the women might preserve [red elderberries]
by wrapping them in maple leaves and putting them in
a hole dug in wet sand.”
Red elderberry fruit leather
SPRING/SUMMER 2016
65