To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] mulberries, cropping period and uses
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 10:56:34 -0500
We've tried drying both the Il. everbearing and the
white mulberries, and the latter are better dried than fresh, in my opinion, and
the Ill. is better fresh than dried.
Subject: [NAFEX] mulberries, cropping
period and uses
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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