Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

nafex - Re: [NAFEX] mulberries, cropping period and uses

nafex@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: markl <markl@nytec.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] mulberries, cropping period and uses
  • Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 20:52:29 -0400 (EST)

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
>




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page