Ingredient

Mulberry

A ripe mulberry falls apart if you look at it. It has no shelf life worth measuring, it stains everything within reach a deep permanent purple, and it is one of the best fruits in Britain. These facts are related, and together they explain why a mulberry is something you inherit with a garden rather than something you buy.

Why no shop sells them

A mulberry ripens to the point of collapse and then falls. Picked firm it is sour and pointless; picked ripe it is a bag of juice with a skin around it that will not survive being put in a punnet, let alone a lorry. Commercial fruit distribution simply cannot handle it.

The standard harvesting method is to spread a sheet under the tree and shake, which tells you most of what you need to know about the fruit's structural integrity.

The flavour is worth all of it: deep, winey, sweet with a real acidity behind it, somewhere between a blackberry and a very good loganberry but with more depth than either.

The three mulberries

Black mulberry

Morus nigra. The one worth growing for fruit. Slow, long-lived, gnarled, and the flavour is the best of the three by a distance.

White mulberry

Morus alba. Grown historically for silkworms rather than for fruit. Sweet, insipid, low in acid, and mostly disappointing to eat.

Red mulberry

Morus rubra. North American, good, and almost unknown in Britain.

Ripeness

A black mulberry is ready when it is deep purple-black and comes away at a touch. Red ones are not ripe, whatever the name suggests.

The tree

Notoriously slow to fruit — a decade is common — and then extremely long-lived. Many British mulberries are several hundred years old.

What to do with a month of falling fruit

• Eat them standing under the tree, which is the correct primary use.
• Freeze them the day you pick them. Open-freeze on trays. This is the only realistic way to keep them at all.
• Mulberry gin or vodka, steeped with sugar for a few months. Outstanding, and it uses damaged fruit.
• Jam. Mulberries are low in pectin, so combine with apple, redcurrant or a little lemon, or use jam sugar.
• A simple compote over ice cream or thick yoghurt — five minutes with sugar and a squeeze of lemon.
• Mulberry vinegar, in the same way as raspberry vinegar, which is excellent with duck.
• In a summer pudding in place of some of the blackcurrant, where the depth is remarkable.

Picking and handling

Assume you will be purple.

1. Spread an old sheet under the tree and shake the branches. Ripe fruit falls; unripe fruit stays put, which does the sorting for you.
2. Wear gloves and something you do not care about. Mulberry stain on skin fades in a day or two; on cotton it does not.
3. Handle the fruit as little as possible. Tip it from the sheet into a shallow tray rather than picking it up.
4. Do not wash unless you have to, and if you must, float and lift rather than rinse.
5. Get it into the freezer or the pan the same day. There is no second day.

Common questions