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Mulberries, Preserved
INGREDIENTS.-To 2½ lbs. of fruit and 1 pint of juice allow 2 lbs. of loaf sugar.
Put some of the fruit into a preserving pan, and simmer it gently until the juice is well drawn. Strain it through a bag, measure it, and to every pint allow the above proportion of sugar and fruit. Put the sugar into the preserving-pan, moisten it with the juice, boil it up, skim well and then add the mulberries, which should be ripe, but not soft enough to break to a pulp. Let them stand in the syrup till warm through, then set them on the fire to boil gently; when half done, turn them carefully into MULBERRIES. an earthen pan, and let them remain till the next day; then boil them as before, and when the syrup is thick and becomes firm when cold, put the preserve into pots. In making this, care should be taken not to break the mulberries; this may be avoided by gentle stirring, and by simmering the fruit very slowly.
TIME. hour to extract the juice; to boil the mulberries the first time, 1/4 hour the second time.
SEASONABLE in August and September.
MULLAGATAWNY SOUP.
A two-day whole-fruit preserve in which the mulberries stay intact in a thick syrup rather than collapsing into jam. The instructions are sound; the units and the missing times need translating.
- The proportions, read plainlyFor every 2 lb of whole mulberries and 1 pint of extracted juice, use 2 lb of sugar. The pint is an imperial pint (20 fl oz, 570 ml), so a metric working batch is roughly 900 g fruit, 570 ml juice, 900 g sugar. You will need extra fruit beyond the 2 lb to cook down for the juice — reckon on another 1 to 1.5 lb.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed, prized because it threw off less scum. Ordinary granulated or preserving sugar is the direct replacement; preserving sugar has larger crystals that dissolve more evenly and reduce the skimming.
- Preserving panA wide, shallow, unlined copper or brass pan. Any wide heavy-based stainless or enamelled pan works — width matters more than material, since evaporation is what thickens the syrup. Avoid unlined copper or aluminium with this much acid fruit.
- The garbled timesThe TIME line has lost figures in printing: the duration for drawing the juice and the length of the first boil are both missing, and cannot be recovered from the text. Only the second boil survives as a quarter of an hour. Work by eye: simmer the first batch until the juice is well drawn, give the whole berries a short first boil, and about a quarter of an hour on the second day.
- Judging the setMulberries are low in pectin, so this sets as a heavy syrup rather than a firm jelly. Work to about 220F/104C on a sugar thermometer, or test a spoonful on a chilled saucer — it should wrinkle when pushed and hold its shape when cold.
- Why the overnight restStanding the fruit in hot syrup for a day lets sugar migrate into the berries slowly, so they plump rather than shrivel and burst. This is the hinge of the recipe. Skipping it gives you broken fruit in thin syrup.
- Handling the fruitRipe mulberries bruise if looked at hard. Pick over rather than wash if possible, and keep the boil at a bare tremble. The recipe itself prescribes gentle stirring to keep the fruit whole; shaking the pan is an alternative if you would rather not put a spoon in.
- Potting and keepingAn earthen pan is any non-reactive bowl — glass or ceramic. Pot into hot sterilised jars and seal at once; for storage at room temperature for more than a few weeks, process the sealed jars in a boiling water bath following current preserving guidance. Expect around four to five 340 g jars from the quantities above.
- SeasonAugust and September still holds in Britain. Mulberries do not travel or keep, so this is a recipe for a tree you know rather than a shop.
Mulberries were a garden fruit rather than a market one long before Mrs Beeton's day, and largely still are: the ripe fruit bleeds at a touch and will not survive transport, so it has always belonged to whoever owns the tree. The black mulberry, Morus nigra, was widely planted in English gardens from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onward; the frequently repeated story that James I encouraged plantings in hopes of a domestic silk industry, and that the wrong species was chosen, is traditional and often told, though the details are murkier than the retelling suggests. What survives in books like this is the consequence: a fruit that no grocer sold, appearing in the preserving chapter because a household with a mulberry tree faced a glut in late August and no way to sell or store it fresh. The two-day method here, with its slow saturation in syrup, is one of the approaches nineteenth-century cooks used to keep fruit whole and handsome for the table rather than boiling it to jam.