Sake Pear Elderflower Cocktail

In suburban Michigan, where I grew up, you wouldn’t expect there to be too many wild-growing foods. But there, in the backyard of my split-level, aluminum-sided home, we found a cornucopia of free edibles—dandelions, wild blackberries, rhubarb, and tons of black elder bushes that produced both the fragrant flowers and the elderberries that my Slovenian neighbors, the Kaples, made into jam once a year. They sealed it with white wax to preserve it. I never would have known that these ingredie