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Mulberry Syrup
Get the juice from quite ripe mulberries, by putting them into a jar, and setting it in a not very hot oven, or, which is better, in a vessel of boiling water, and, as the juice separates from the fruit, pour it off, and when sufficiently done, strain through a sieve without pulping the mulberries. Boil the juice, allowing to each pint a pound of good loaf sugar; skim, and when cold, put into bottles, and cork tightly. Time, three-quarters of an hour to extract the juice. Boil to a thick syrup.
A simple two-stage preserve: draw the juice with gentle heat, then boil it down with sugar. The whole point is clarity, so the temptation to press the fruit has to be resisted.
- Do not crush the fruitThe instruction to strain "without pulping" is the hinge. Mulberries are full of soft pulp that clouds the syrup and makes it thicken unpleasantly; let the juice run of its own accord and discard the fruit rather than pushing it through the sieve.
- The water bath"A vessel of boiling water" means a heatproof jar standing in a pan of simmering water — a bain-marie. Keep the water at a bare simmer for the stated three-quarters of an hour and top it up as it evaporates. If you use the oven instead, "a not very hot oven" points to a slow oven; keep it low enough that the juice never boils.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; no substitution or adjustment is required.
- Pints and poundsAssuming the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, the ratio is about 1 lb (450 g) sugar to roughly 2 1/2 cups juice. If you measure in US pints of 16 fl oz, scale the sugar down to about 13 oz per pint to keep the same proportion.
- "Boil to a thick syrup"A sugar thermometer helps: around 220-222F gives a syrup that pours thickly. Boiled much further it will be stiffer and stickier when cold.
- SkimmingThe recipe's "skim" comes before cooling, so take the foam off as it rises during boiling rather than afterwards; left in, it clouds the finished syrup.
- Bottling and keepingThis is a high-sugar syrup, not a properly processed conserve. Use scalded bottles, cork or cap tightly, and keep it refrigerated once opened; unopened bottles are best stored cool and dark and used within a few months.
Mulberry syrup sat on the border between the still-room and the medicine chest. Diluted with water it made a summer drink, poured over puddings it was a sauce, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was equally valued as a gargle and throat linctus — syrupus mori appears in old pharmacopoeias for exactly that purpose. The fruit in question is the black mulberry, Morus nigra, a long-lived tree common in English gardens and often planted, so the story generally goes, in the wake of James I's failed attempt to found an English silk industry in the early 1600s. Mulberries do not travel or keep — they bruise very easily and spoil quickly — so anyone with a tree had a glut and no market for it, and turning the crop into a bottled syrup was the practical answer.