Home › A Cluster of Berries › Mulberry Brandy
Mulberry Brandy
To each quart of juice allow a quart of brandy and one pound of sugar. Let stand six weeks, then filter and bottle.
A ratio recipe rather than a procedure: equal volumes of juice and brandy, sweetened, left to marry, then filtered. Everything the original leaves out is technique.
- Getting the juiceThe recipe assumes you already have mulberry juice. Crush ripe fruit, let it sit an hour with a little of the sugar to draw the liquid, then press through a jelly bag. Roughly 3 lb of berries gives a quart of juice; expect less from dry-season fruit.
- Proportions in cupsA quart is 4 cups. So 4 cups juice, 4 cups brandy, 1 lb (about 2 1/4 cups) granulated sugar. Total yield is a little over two quarts of finished cordial once the sugar dissolves.
- What brandy meantHousehold brandy was probably not far off modern bottling strength, though the strength of domestic spirit varied and was not standardised. Any inexpensive grape brandy works; the fruit carries the flavour, so nothing aged or expensive is called for.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the sugar into the juice before adding spirit. Sugar dissolves poorly in high-proof alcohol and will otherwise sit as a sludge at the bottom for weeks.
- The vesselUse glass or glazed stoneware with a tight lid, filled nearly to the top to limit headspace, and keep it out of the light. Mulberry pigment fades badly on a sunny shelf.
- Six weeks, and shakingThe stand is for extraction and for the harshness to settle. Shake or swirl every few days for the first fortnight. Longer than six weeks does no harm; the colour deepens toward brown after several months.
- FilteringRack the clear liquid off the sediment first, then pass it through a coffee filter or several layers of muslin. Pulp forced through under pressure will cloud the bottles permanently.
- Strength and servingSomewhere under 20 percent alcohol by volume once diluted with juice and sweetened -- on the order of 17 percent -- which is cordial rather than spirit territory. Serve in small glasses after a meal, or spoon it over ice cream. Sealed and cool, it keeps for years.
Mulberries have always been an awkward crop for the commercial kitchen: they bruise on picking, stain everything they touch, and turn to mush within a day or two of ripeness, and they appear in Victorian and Edwardian books more often as wine, brandy, cordial and jam than as anything served fresh. Steeping fruit in spirit with sugar was a common domestic answer to a glut of anything too perishable to keep and too good to waste, and comparable preparations went under the names cherry brandy, sloe gin and raspberry cordial -- though those generally steep whole fruit rather than pressed juice. The black mulberry, Morus nigra, was widely planted in English gardens and carried to American ones.