North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Gordon Nofs" <gc_nofs@hotmail.com>]

My White mulberries have the taste of muskmelon sort of. I like it better 
than any of the many mulberries I have including Ill. Ev. They are as large 
also but do not last long.
 I will try to give a more detail message tomorrow.

Gordon C. Nofs
Flint, MI.
****************************************************
----Original Message Follows----
From: markl <markl@nytec.com>
Reply-To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
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
>
_______________________________________________
nafex mailing list
nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
Most questions can be answered here:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/nafex
File attachments are accepted by this list; please do not send binary files, 
plain text ONLY!
Message archives are here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/nafex
To view your user options go to:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/options/nafex/XXXX@XXXX (where XXXX@XXXX is
YOUR email address)
NAFEX web site:   http://www.nafex.org/

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail