North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[markl <markl@nytec.com>]

I don't have enough mulberries to bother with preserving them, but I have 
found dried white mulberries in a Middle Eastern grocery in Seattle.  They 
make an interesting nibble.  They are sweet without much acid to balance 
them.  Not very fruity.  The texture is kind of gummy, like a dried out jelly 
bean.  On the package there is some arabic and a cartoon sketch of an old 
woman holding a bowl of hot cereal (oatmeal?) with dried mulberries sprinkled 
on top.  I haven't tried that recipe yet.
-Mark Lee, Seattle

---- North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:
>     We shook mulberries out of 4 big trees at Hector Black's back in 1991,  
> two of them were Illinois Everbearing.  I remember they cropped for a good 
> 6 weeks, maybe longer.  It was long enough that his grandkids and other 
> local kids actually got tired of raiding the trees.  The other trees did 
> not have the size of fruit or balance of flavor, and were done cropping in 
> just a couple of weeks.  That's the only time I have had access to so many 
> mulberrries that I didn't know what to do with them all.  Normally I just 
> stand under a tree and stuff myself.  I went to one of the good trees in 
> town recently and found to my dismay that it had been cut down.  
>      I remember from Smith's book on tree crops that in Afghanistan in the 
> good ole days that dried mulberries were a staple food in winter.  People 
> swept the ground under the white mulberry trees, let the fruit fall on the 
> ground to dry, and then swept them up and presumably winnowed out the ants 
> and chaff.   Seems like I have read that in all the decades of fighting 
> there, that many of the trees were cut down, probably to cut off food 
> supplies to the other side but I'm sure some were used as firewood too.  
> After all, to a passing soldier, future food production capacity is not 
> nearly as important as it is to local farmers and residents.  
>     White mulberries have lower acids than our native reds.  IE is a cross. 
>  I would suspect that the whites have slightly higher %solids, just as 
> plums for drying do, but it's probably not really important in a dry place 
> like Afghanistan.  Seems like I dried some of the IE berries, but I don't 
> really remember what they tasted like.  I think they had more of a flavor 
> like raisins than any of the other fruit I have dried.  Generally I prefer 
> sour apples to sweet apples when dried, but seems like the white mulberries 
> were a little nicer that way.  Just out of curiosity, have any of the rest 
> of you tried drying mulberries?  What did you think?  Did yo use them for 
> anything?  I almost never cook with dried fruit, I prefer just to use it 
> for snacks.   Donna 
>