My Favourite Elderberry Recipes & Remedies
- Dr Lucy
- Aug 16
- 10 min read
Elderberries always feel like one of the first little nudges towards autumn for me - even when I'm still very much holding onto summer.
They sit beautifully between food and medicine, summer abundance and autumn preparation. Gathering them gives me a small job to do now that helps me begin imagining and preparing for the season ahead, without needing to hurry summer out of the door.
They're unusually early here in the UK this year, so rather than rushing to turn them into syrup in August, I'm gathering them as they ripen and freezing them. It means I can make fresh batches later in the season, rather than starting the clock on a fridge full of syrup now.
For generations, these dark little berries have been cooked and preserved for the colder months. Here are three of my favourite ways to use them - from the home apothecary to the kitchen.
If you've gathered your own, my Elderberry: How to Harvest, Prepare & Use This Late-Summer Hedgerow Medicine guide is the place to begin. It covers identification, knowing when the berries are genuinely ripe, responsible harvesting and safe preparation, alongside their traditional use and what modern research actually tells us about elderberry.
For now, though, let's assume you've arrived home with your harvest.
What shall we make with it?
Before We Begin
If you're working with freshly gathered elderberries, take a little time to remove the berries from their stalks and sort through them before you begin. I find running a fork gently through the clusters is by far the easiest way to do this, although freezing the clusters first can make the berries even easier to remove.
Discard any remaining stalks and leaves along with green, underripe, mouldy or badly damaged berries, keeping the beautifully ripe purple-black fruit.
Elderberries also aren't a fruit I recommend eating raw. Raw and unripe elderberries, together with the leaves and stems, contain cyanogenic compounds, so the recipes here all involve properly cooking the fruit.
And if your berries are ready but you aren't, don't fret. Harvest what you need and pop them into the freezer. Harvest when the plant is ready. Make when you're ready. Those two things don't always have to happen on the same day.
1. Elderberry, Ginger & Spice Syrup with Brandy
If there is one elderberry preparation people seem to want in their home apothecary, it's this one.
Elderberry syrup has become something of a modern winter staple, but the principle behind it is wonderfully old-fashioned: take something abundant at the end of summer, prepare and preserve it, and put a little away for the colder months ahead.
My version combines the berries with fresh ginger and just enough cinnamon and clove to bring some warmth without overwhelming the elderberry itself. Honey softens the natural tartness of the fruit, while optional brandy brings another layer of warmth and can contribute to its keeping qualities.
I've also deliberately written this as a small-batch recipe. A responsible forage doesn't always result in enormous quantities of fruit, and you really don't need a huge basket of elderberries to make something worthwhile.
You will need
100g fresh, fully ripe elderberries, destemmed and sorted
200ml water
10g fresh ginger, thinly sliced
½ cinnamon stick
2-3 whole cloves
Raw honey
(Brandy, around 40% ABV - optional)
To make
Place the elderberries, water, ginger, cinnamon and cloves into a small saucepan and bring gently to the boil.
Reduce the heat, partially cover and simmer gently until the elderberries are thoroughly cooked and the liquid has reduced into a rich, dark decoction, giving the berries a good mash as they soften. Around 20–30 minutes is a useful guide, but don't become too attached to the clock - pan size, heat and the water content of your berries will all affect how quickly the liquid reduces.
Strain everything through a fine sieve into a measuring jug, pressing the fruit to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard the spent berries for compost.
Now measure how much elderberry decoction you've actually produced.
For every 100ml of strained elderberry decoction, add approximately 50ml honey, stirring it through while the liquid is still warm enough for the honey to dissolve easily.
This is where herbal syrup recipes can become a little confusing, because there isn't one universally agreed amount - or even type - of sweetener.
I'm using roughly one part honey to two parts decoction, a proportion also used by herbalist Rosemary Gladstar in her general method for medicinal syrups. But you'll also find plenty of traditional elderberry syrups made much more simply with elderberries, water and ordinary sugar, often using a generous amount of sugar because it wasn't there just for sweetness - it was part of the preservation method.
You can absolutely take that route, particularly if what you want is a more traditional, sweet fruit syrup designed with keeping qualities in mind. I use honey because I prefer its flavour here and like it as part of a home-apothecary preparation, but I'm deliberately not adding the enormous quantity of sweetener required to rely on sugar alone for preservation.
So for this recipe, 50ml honey per 100ml decoction is my starting point. If you'd prefer it sweeter, you can increase that - even towards equal parts honey and decoction. With the lower-honey version, however, I treat it as a refrigerated preparation rather than assuming the honey will preserve it.
Allow the syrup to cool completely before adding the optional brandy. If using it, add approximately 25ml brandy (around 40% ABV) for every 100ml of strained elderberry decoction. Alcohol has traditionally been used alongside sugar or honey to improve the keeping qualities of herbal syrups, although at this proportion I'm treating it as an additional preservation hurdle rather than relying on it to make the syrup shelf-stable.
Transfer to a sterilised bottle or jar, label and date it, and keep refrigerated.
What exactly is a decoction?
If you're relatively new to making herbal preparations, you may be wondering what I mean when I keep calling this dark elderberry liquid a decoction.
Most of us are already familiar with making an infusion: we pour hot water over something relatively delicate, such as leaves or flowers, and leave it to steep.
A decoction is a water-based extraction made by gently simmering plant material for a period of time, rather than simply pouring over hot water. It's traditionally used for tougher or denser materials such as roots, bark, seeds and berries, where the prolonged heat helps extract their water-soluble constituents.
And that's exactly what you've just done with your elderberries.
By simmering the berries, ginger and spices for around 20–30 minutes and allowing some of the water to evaporate, you've made a concentrated elderberry decoction. Straining removes the spent plant material; adding honey then turns that decoction into our syrup.
Once you understand the technique, you'll start recognising it as the first step in all sorts of home-apothecary preparations.
What if I forage more or less than 100g?
Elderberries rarely appear in convenient recipe-sized quantities, so simply work with what you've gathered. Start with approximately one part fresh (or thawed) elderberries to two parts water:
70g elderberries → 140ml water
100g elderberries → 200ml water
125g elderberries → 250ml water
150g elderberries → 300ml water
The ginger and spices don't need to be scaled with mathematical precision; adjust them reasonably according to the size of your batch.
Once everything has cooked, reduced and been strained, forget the original weight of your berries and simply measure your decoction.
As a starting point:
100ml strained decoction → approximately 50ml honey
You can increase the honey if you'd like a sweeter, more traditional syrup.
That means whatever amount the hedgerow gives you can become syrup.
What about making elderberry syrup with sugar instead?
You absolutely can, and indeed you'll find plenty of elderberry syrup recipes made simply with elderberries, water and ordinary sugar. There is also an important reason many traditional fruit and herbal syrups contain considerably more sugar than we might instinctively want to add today.
Sugar isn't simply there for sweetness or to make the medicine taste nicer. At sufficiently high concentrations, it reduces the amount of water available for microorganisms to grow, which is why high-sugar jams, jellies and syrups have been used to preserve seasonal fruit for generations.
In fact, before refrigeration was commonplace, that extra sugar had a very practical purpose.
A modern lightly sweetened honey syrup and a traditional high-sugar syrup are therefore not quite the same preparation, even if we give them the same name.
My version is a small-batch honey syrup that I keep refrigerated. If your priority is making something specifically for long-term cupboard storage, I would use a properly tested high-sugar preserving recipe rather than simply increasing the honey in this one and assuming it is shelf-stable.
And there is another wonderfully simple option: freeze some of your berries! You don't actually have to turn the whole late-summer harvest into syrup immediately. Frozen elderberries can become another small batch later in the season when the first bottle has gone.
Sometimes preserving the harvest simply means buying yourself a little more time.
2. Elderberry & Apple Fruit Leather
This might be the recipe I'm most excited about.
The idea came from hearing about traditional dried fruit preparations made around the Mediterranean and neighbouring regions, which sent me down a little rabbit hole into pestil, the Turkish tradition of drying prepared fruit pulp into thin sheets.
Elderberry isn't one of the fruits I would automatically associate with fruit leather, but it makes so much sense. The berries are beautifully dark and tart, while apple gives the mixture sweetness and body, resulting in something that feels completely removed from the idea of taking elderberry "medicine" from a spoon.
It's simply preserved fruit - and a particularly lovely way of making something gathered from the hedgerow feel accessible to the whole family.
You will need
100g fresh, fully ripe elderberries, destemmed and sorted
2 medium eating apples, peeled, cored and roughly chopped
50ml water
1–2 teaspoons lemon juice
A little honey, if needed
To make
Place the elderberries, apple and water into a saucepan and bring gently to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for around 15–20 minutes, until the elderberries are thoroughly cooked and the apple is completely soft.
Blend into a smooth purée. Elderberry seeds can become quite noticeable once dried, so for a smoother finished leather I would press the purée through a fine sieve at this stage.
Stir through the lemon juice and have a taste. Depending on your apples, you may find it needs nothing else, but add a little honey if you'd prefer it sweeter.
Spread the purée in a thin, even layer over a suitable dehydrator sheet or silicone-lined baking tray.
If you're using a dehydrator, dry at around 60°C until the fruit is leathery and pliable with no obvious pockets of moisture. You can also use a low oven if yours will maintain a suitably low temperature.
Drying time will vary depending on your fruit, the thickness of the layer and the equipment you're using, so let the texture rather than the clock tell you when it's ready.
Once completely cool, peel away from the sheet and cut into strips or little pieces.
3. Elderberry & Apple Chutney
And finally, something savoury.
Because elderberries are so strongly associated with syrups and winter remedies, it's easy to forget that they are also simply a wonderfully tart hedgerow fruit.
Paired with apple, onion, vinegar and warming spices, they make a deep, fruity chutney that feels entirely different from everything else we've made.
I particularly like the thought of this alongside a good mature cheddar, in sandwiches or as part of an autumnal ploughman's lunch - elderberry quite firmly removed from the remedy cupboard and placed back onto the family table.
You will need
100g fresh, fully ripe elderberries, destemmed and sorted
150g cooking apple, peeled, cored and diced
75g onion, finely chopped
100ml apple cider vinegar (with the mother if possible)
65g soft brown sugar
8g fresh ginger, finely grated
½ teaspoon mustard seeds
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
A pinch of ground allspice
A small pinch of salt
To make
Place all of the ingredients into a heavy-based saucepan and stir gently over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved.
Bring to a gentle simmer and cook uncovered for around 45–60 minutes, stirring regularly, until the fruit has broken down and the chutney is thick, dark and glossy. As it reduces, stir more frequently to prevent it catching. You'll know you're getting close when drawing a spoon across the bottom of the pan leaves a trail that doesn't immediately fill with liquid.
Transfer to a sterlised jar, allow to cool and keep refrigerated.
I'm deliberately treating this as a small-batch refrigerator chutney rather than giving you instructions for a shelf-stable canned preserve. If long-term cupboard preservation is your goal, use a specifically tested recipe designed for that purpose.
Which Elderberry Recipe Should I Make First?
Please don't look at three recipes and think you now need to make all three.
If you're particularly interested in building your home apothecary, start with the elderberry syrup. It's the traditional preparation most people come looking for, but making it also teaches you something much more transferable: how to turn a tougher plant material into a decoction and then use that as the basis of another herbal preparation.
If you want something a little unexpected - particularly something that makes foraging and preserving feel wonderfully normal and family-friendly - I'd try the elderberry and apple fruit leather.
And if you want to take elderberries completely out of the remedy cupboard, make the chutney.
There isn't really a best use for an elderberry harvest. What makes sense will depend on how much you've gathered, how much time you have and what you and your family will genuinely use.
A handful of berries doesn't need to become an enormous preserving project in order to be worthwhile.
From Hedgerow to Home Apothecary
I think this is the part of seasonal herbalism that can so easily get lost when we concentrate only on what individual plants are "good for".
The useful skill isn't simply knowing that elderberry has traditionally been associated with winter illness. It's recognising elder when you walk past it, watching the berries change through the summer, knowing when they're ripe, gathering a little when there is plenty and then having enough confidence in the kitchen to actually do something with what you've brought home.
Sometimes that might mean turning them into a traditional elderberry syrup and, almost without realising it, learning how to make a decoction along the way. Sometimes it might mean drying them into fruit leather. And sometimes it might simply mean opening a jar of elderberry chutney alongside lunch.
None of those feels less valuable to me than the others.
They are simply different ways of becoming a little more familiar with the plants growing around us and making their place in our everyday lives feel ordinary again.
That feels like the real point of all of this. Not an apothecary overflowing with things we felt obliged to make, but a growing collection of skills that means, when the season offers us something, we know what to do with it.
Continue Exploring Elder
If you've arrived here because you've found elderberries growing near you and aren't completely confident about identification, ripeness or harvesting yet, begin with:
And if you'd like to follow elder through the other half of its year:
Together, they follow one familiar tree from its creamy early-summer flowers to the dark fruit hanging from its branches as summer begins to turn.
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