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Mulberries, Preserved
Simmer the mulberries in a jar, as directed in the recipe for MULBERRY SYRUP, and strain the juice. Put a pint of this into a preserving-pan, with two pounds and a half of sugar in small lumps; stir until the sugar is dissolved. Keep it boiling for about five minutes, skimming carefully, then add two pounds of the fruit, without any bruised berries. Move them gently in the syrup, and let the pan stand by the side of the fire until the preserve is hot through, then boil very gently for half an hour, and put them by to cool until next day. This would be best done in an earthenware or enamelled pan, as the shifting from one vessel to another is likely to break the fruit. Boil again next day. The syrup, when cold, should be firm; test it before the pots are filled. Mulberries are not often bought, as they are not produced plentifully in England. The preserve is refreshing and cooling, and the syrup, when mixed with water, is efficacious in cases of sore throat.
A two-day whole-fruit preserve: the berries are held intact in a heavy syrup rather than crushed into jam. The instructions assume you have already made mulberry juice by the syrup method referenced in the book.
- The juice step"Simmer the mulberries in a jar" means standing a covered stoneware jar of fruit in a pan of barely simmering water until the berries collapse and give up their juice, then straining. A heatproof bowl over a water bath does the same thing, and keeps the juice from scorching.
- Sugar ratioTwo and a half pounds of sugar to one pint of juice is roughly 1.1 kg to 570 ml, a very heavy syrup by modern standards. "Small lumps" simply refers to loaf sugar broken up; granulated sugar works identically here.
- Why the fruit goes in secondThe syrup is boiled and skimmed clean before the berries meet it; skimming off the sugar scum at this stage is what keeps the finished jars clear.
- Handle mulberries almost not at allThis is the hinge. Ripe mulberries disintegrate at a touch, which is why the recipe says to move them gently, avoid bruised fruit, and keep to a single pan so nothing is decanted. Move the fruit by tilting the pan rather than dragging a spoon through it.
- "By the side of the fire"On a range this means the coolest spot, off direct heat. Modern equivalent: the lowest burner setting, or the pan set over a heat diffuser, until the whole mass is hot before you let it simmer.
- Pan materialEnamelled cast iron or stainless steel. The warning against "shifting from one vessel to another" is about broken fruit, but avoid untinned copper and bare iron with this much acid regardless.
- Testing the setA spoonful chilled on a cold saucer should wrinkle when pushed; that corresponds to about 220F / 105C on a thermometer. Mulberries are low in pectin, so the set here comes largely from sugar concentration, and the second day's boil is what gets it there.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is given; from 2.5 lb sugar, 2 lb fruit and a pint of juice expect in the region of four to five half-pint jars. Fill hot jars and seal at once; because no processing time is given, treat these as refrigerator preserves once opened, and check the seals before storing.
- The sore-throat claimMulberry syrup in water is a traditional throat drink, nothing more. Treat it as a pleasant cordial rather than medicine.
Mulberries reached English gardens long before they reached English markets, and the note that they "are not often bought" is the whole story of the fruit in Britain: too soft to travel, too quick to ferment, harvested by shaking a sheet under the tree. Black mulberry (Morus nigra) was widely planted for fruit, and separately for silkworm feeding schemes in the seventeenth century; the story that the wrong species was planted for the purpose, the white mulberry being the one silkworms prefer, is often repeated but remains a contested tradition. The recipe sits among the whole-fruit preserves rather than the jams because a mulberry that holds its shape in clear syrup was a mark of skill in a Victorian still-room, and because a household with a mulberry tree had a glut for a fortnight and nothing to do with it otherwise. The claimed value against sore throat is the older apothecary tradition surfacing in a cookery book: mulberry syrup, syrupus mori, appeared in pharmacopoeias as a gargle base and colouring agent well into the nineteenth century.