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General Directions for Mulberries
Mulberries may be used in all ways suitable for blackor raspberries but are superior to them or almost any other fruit in the matter of jelly-making, having the rich colour and tartness of currant with a little more "body," but very tender. For shrub and rob, also, the mulberry has few rivals.
MULBERRY JELLY No. I For a most brilliant, crimson jelly, tart and firm, use only the hard, red, immature berries (those nearly fullsized). To each three quarts of berries add one quart cold water. Let simmer slowly together fifty minutes, when add a second quart of cold water and simmer again for an hour, mashing well the berries. The resulting juice should be thick and rich-looking. Have sugar ready, heated, in another pan, and allow a pint for each pint of juice. Skim well. When the sugar has quite dissolved and boiled three minutes test it, for it may then be ready to pour into glasses. Five minutes is usually quite sufficient. Place in the sun till firm and cool.
MULBERRY JELLY No. 2 For a darker, sweet, jelly, use equal parts of the hard red (or even the berries scarcely yet red), and fully ripe berries. Use but a pint of water with three quarts of berries, simmering till all juice can be extracted by mashing in the kettle. Strain well and proceed as above.
Two jellies from one fruit, both relying on underripe berries for set. Mulberries are low in pectin and low in acid when ripe, which is exactly why the recipe insists on the hard red ones.
- The hinge: use unripe fruitMulberries carry almost no pectin once fully ripe and are not notably acidic. The firm, immature red berries supply both, so the proportions in Jelly No. 1 are not a stylistic preference but the whole mechanism of the set. Substituting all ripe fruit will give you syrup.
- QuantitiesThree quarts of berries is roughly 4 lb; the two quarts of water in No. 1 total 8 cups. Sugar is measured by volume against the juice, pint for pint, which is the standard 1:1 jelly ratio.
- Heating the sugarWarming the sugar in a separate pan was a common recommendation, to keep the juice from dropping off the boil. Gentle warming in a low oven does the same, though with a modern heavy pan and a strong burner it is optional.
- Testing for set"Boiled three minutes... five minutes is usually quite sufficient" assumes the cook knows the sheet test. Use a thermometer: 220F at sea level, or chill a spoonful on a cold saucer and push it with a finger to see if it wrinkles. Add roughly 2F less for every 1,000 feet of elevation.
- StrainingNo. 1 never says to strain, though No. 2 does. Both need it. Pour the mashed pulp into a scalded jelly bag or a double layer of cheesecloth and let it drip without squeezing, or the jelly will be cloudy.
- "Place in the sun till firm"Sun-setting was a real technique for evaporating surface moisture and firming a soft jelly, but it also leaves open glasses exposed for hours. Fill sterilised jars, leave a quarter-inch headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes rather than relying on paraffin or sunlight.
- Shrub and robA shrub is a sweetened fruit syrup for diluting into a cold drink, usually sharpened with vinegar and sometimes with spirit; a rob is a fruit juice boiled down to a thick, sweet concentrate, historically taken medicinally. Both are mentioned only in passing here.
- YieldYield is not predictable from the text, and the two versions differ sharply: No. 1 adds two quarts of water, No. 2 only a pint, so they will not give the same quantity of juice or the same number of jars.
Mulberry trees were planted across Britain and the eastern United States for reasons that had little to do with the fruit; the great waves of planting, in Britain from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in America most feverishly in the 1830s, were speculative attempts to establish silk production, which required the leaves rather than the berries. The trees outlasted the silk schemes, and generations of cooks inherited a heavy annual crop of soft, staining, quickly fermenting fruit that does not travel and so almost never reached commercial markets. That is why mulberries appear in domestic fruit books like this one: the recipes exist for people who have a tree. The writer's insistence on hard, immature berries reflects a practical understanding of pectin that predates its isolation and commercial sale as a jelly-making additive, when the only way to get a firm set was to build it out of the fruit itself.