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SYRUP OF MULBERRIES (a French recipe)
Gather and pick the fruit before it is quite ripe, that the juice may have a little acidity. Reduce to powder an equal weight of sugar, and place it, together with the fruit, in a preserving-pan; do not mash the fruit, or it will make the juice thick. Set the pan over a very moderate fire; the heat will soon burst the fruit, and by this means the juice will be quite clear. When the sugar is dissolved it will require a few boilings to make the syrup. Strain it through a horsehair sieve without pressing the fruit. The mulberries will remain in the sieve, and the syrup will not need to be clarified.
A cold-extraction-by-heat method: the fruit is never crushed, so the syrup runs clear and needs no clarifying. Everything else follows from that one restraint.
- Do not mash, do not pressThe hinge of the recipe. Mulberries are full of soft pulp that will cloud the syrup and thicken it into something closer to a puree. Let the heat split the skins, and when straining, let gravity do the work — squeezing the sieve undoes the whole method.
- Equal weight sugarWeigh the picked fruit and match it exactly in sugar. "Reduce to powder" means caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves before the pan gets hot enough to scorch; a food processor will take granulated sugar most of the way there.
- "A very moderate fire"The lowest heat that will do anything. You want the berries to weep and burst, not to boil in their own juice.
- "A few boilings"Once the sugar has dissolved, bring it to a full boil briefly, take it off, and repeat two or three times, skimming as you go. Total boiling of more than a few minutes will thicken it toward jelly and dull the fresh flavour.
- The horsehair sieveHorsehair had the advantage of being non-metallic, so it would not react with acid fruit. A nylon or stainless fine-mesh sieve does the same job; avoid bare aluminium, which acid fruit juice will discolour.
- Underripe fruitThe instruction to pick before full ripeness is about acidity, which balances the sugar. Slightly red-purple rather than black berries, or a proportion of them, gives the sharpness intended.
- Yield and keepingYield varies with how much juice the unpressed fruit releases; 2 lb of fruit with 2 lb of sugar will give something over a pint. Bottle it hot in sterilised bottles, then refrigerate and use within a month, or freeze in portions.
- What to do with itDilute one part syrup to five or six parts still or sparkling water for a cordial, or spoon it over ice cream, rice pudding or pancakes. The strained berries are worth keeping for a fool or a tart.
Mulberry syrup has a long life as medicine before it was a drink: syrupus mori, made from the juice of black mulberries and sugar, appears in European pharmacopoeias as a gargle and colouring agent for throat preparations, and the fruit's astringency is the reason it was chosen. The technique itself is distinctive — sirop de mûres made by heat-bursting whole fruit rather than pressing it, so that no clarifying with egg white or filtering through jelly-bag is needed. The domestic context matters too: black mulberry trees were common in English gardens and rectory grounds by the nineteenth century, and the fruit is far too fragile to have travelled to market, so a household recipe for mulberries tends to assume a tree of one's own and a glut of soft fruit that had to be dealt with in a day or two.