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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
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