ELDERBERRY

Notwithstanding the fact that supermarkets are best to be avoided, they still provide an interesting research ground as to what the industry thinks customers will be more attracted by. At least, that's how I look at them: they are a display of the industry's applied intelligence. Yesterday I paid a short trip to one of these medium size city supermarkets.
It was time of Christmas foods reductions. Small samples of cheeses packed together with a small bottle of truffle flavored oil apparently sold less well than expected.
To my surprise, I could not find wheat germ, yeast extract, corn flour. These are basics that are used for baking. The fact that they were not there tells me that very few people are busy with foods that take a bit of time to make and bake.
Anyway, at one point I caught the sight of a bottle of elderberry syrup. Elderberries grow a bit everywhere. In Italy there is an industrial cordial called "Sambuca", which is extracted from the plant, has a flavor similar to pastis and makes water turn into a milky liquid.
The flowers are white, very small and they grow like an umbrella. My mum tells me that they were used to make biscuits and that they are quite aromatic. I even found a recipe for covering these umbrella-formations in a sweet batter and frying them.
The berries are a bit more difficult to come by. The only time I remember tasting them was in 1996, in the Black Forest, near Freiburg. In Germany it is easy to find elderberry jelly, a dark jelly with a flavor with a very subtle flavor.
The reason why the elderberry syrup was there, next to an Alpine herbs cough syrup, is that elderberries are a mega source of Vitamic C. A closer look revealed that the syrup is mostly sugar and that elderberries are a mere 14%. Despite this (the fact that one is buying sugar for a pretty high price), two spoonfuls of syrup contain 100% of the recommended daily Vitamin C intake for an adult person.
Here below is a comparison between grapes and elderberries.

GRAPE

Nutrition values:
Vitamin A: 80 I.U. per 100 gm.
Vitamin B: Thiamine 0.06 mg.:
Riboflavin 0.04 mg : Niacin 0.2 mg.
Vitamin C: 4 mg.
Protein: 1.4 gm
Calories: 70
Fat: 1.4 gm.
Carbohydrates: 14.9 gm.
Calcium: 17 gm.
Iron: 0.6 mg.
Phosphorus: 21 mg.

ELDERBERRY
Nutrition values:
Vitamin A: 600 I.U. per 100 gm.
Vitamin B: Thiamine 0.07 mg.:
Riboflavin 0.06 mg : Niacin 0.5 mg.
Vitamin C: 36mg.
Protein: 2.6 gm
Calories: 72
Fat: 0.5 gm.
Carbohydrates: 16.4 gm.
Calcium: 38 gm.
Iron: 1.6 mg.
Phosphorus: 28 mg.