ISSUE 66, BEVERAGES FROM PLANTS, Part 5: Mulberry Juice, A Rare Treat

Mulberry Juice

One of the peculiar developments in American taste has been the turn away from the Mulberry, as a fruit, as an ingredients in jams and jellies, and as juice.  I can understand aspects of the disenchantment.  The early American fascination with the Mulberry was connected with a fantasy that this country could become a silk producing land.  Silk worms ate mulberry leaves.  In England this realization dawned during the 1610s, just at the time Virginia was being colonized.  King James the I mandated the planting of trees across England (some still stand), but he chose the Black Mulberry brought in from the Middle East.  Silk Worms did not like the leaves of the Black Mulberry.  It would take 150 years before agronomists realized that Chinese White Mulberry was the worms’ favorite food.  The fruits of the black and white mulberry taste different as well.  Black can be sumptuous, with a piquant acid not to counteract the sweet.  White Mulberry tastes insipidly sweet.  Both taste different from the American native red Mulberry that has a flavor in the middle of the spectrum.  When White Mulberry began being planted extensively across America in the earl 19th century (farmers drunk on visions of silk wealth), the black mulberry became a human eating tree and the white a worm food tree.  Except that human beings can’t abide seeing fruit ready to hand and not consume it.  So they ate white mulberry and decided maybe worms were the appropriate consumers.  A distaste for mulberry seized the populace. 

            Except in places that kept the old tasty black mulberries.  Yard trees persisted in country homesteads.  It was this scattered set of rural old believers that mulberry foodways and cureways were kept alive.  Blackberry juice was regarded as a potent tonic.  It had numbers of curative effects: coat an irritated patch of skin with mulberry juice, the inflammation will go down; if you suffer from recurrent stress headaches, take a glass and their intensity will diminish, a glass a day will make you regular, employ it as a a hair rinse and dry scalp and dandruff issues decline. 

            There is currently only one commercial producer of black mulberry juice: Smart Juice.  It sells at $6.79 for approximate 34 fluid ozs, a reasonable price.  The flavor is rich, unlike any other berry and possesses enough acid underneath the fructose to have character.  I spoke with a representative of the company, inquiring who bought the product.  Since I was not a rival manufacturer and had academic credentials, answers came: its greatest popularity is among immigrants from India, where the health benefits of Mulberry remain very much in public awareness.  The South supplies a steady stream of internet sales.  It is used there as for preserves and in baking.  The Pacific Northwest, however, has an ever more robust fanbase. 

            The late A. J. Bullock of Mt. Olive NC was the great champion of Mulberry varieties in our region.  He grew numbers of varieties because sylvaculture was his passion, but sold a strain of “Persian Black” that was related to the original varieties secured by the English at the beginning of the 17th century.  It had longer fruit than most now available from nurseries.  The English Black is more compact in its fruit form.  Did NAFAX take over his collection after his death?