RECIPE: MULBERRY-PLUM PRESERVE

Persian mulberries are like fruit from a fairy tale: a familiar thing—the dark summer berry—transformed by preposterous imagination into something strange, enchanted and enchanting.

They grow not on brambles but in trees and are so fragile that they can hardly be picked without disintegrating. Their juice is an indelible dye of indescribable color, closest perhaps to the ancient Mediterraneans' Tyrian purple, the color Enobarbus had in mind when describing his queen Cleopatra's conveyance upon the Nile:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them.

Antony & Cleopatra (II, ii)

In the mouth, mulberries are contradictory. They are liquid reservoirs and yet, unlike watery and insipid grapes, they have an intensely concentrated flavor. At first the taste seems too sweet—innocent and flamboyant—until, in the blink of an eye, it contracts into a dark inner core and reemerges as something something winelike and poignant. Mulberries are almost too much, but as with the rose window at Chartres, some mysterious proportion—of acid to sugar, earth to perfume, black to red—exalts the excess.

Don't count on finding mulberries at the grocery store. Their shelf life from tree to rot has to be measured in hours, not days. When you find some at a farmer's market, expect to pay dear and plan to eat them quickly. If, however, you're lucky enough to have a tree in your yard, then you can make a mulberry preserves that, while perhaps not as dazzling as the fresh fruit, is still unlike anything else.

In an odd twist, this recipe was inspired by two Bettinas. My friend and artworld advisor Bettina Korek told me about the mulberry jam her mother used to make from their backyard tree. Then Bettina Birch, who sells her own Bee Green Farm mulberries at Surfas in Culver City every Saturday, told me that she puts up mulberries by packing them cold into jars and pouring hot plum syrup over them. Lordy I can't afford to do that, since the cost of mulberries works out to twenty-some dollars a pound. But working off that idea, I bought four little cartons of mulberries from Bettina B and stretched them with some of her terrific cherry plums.

The below recipe is more like recipe notes than a well-tested master recipe. My objective here was to maintain whole berries in a jelly that set up firmly. It worked well, with a few small caveats noted below.

MULBERRY-PLUM PRESERVE

24 oz mulberries

24 oz (about 2# whole fruit) dark red plums like Santa Rosas, pitted and sliced

2 lbs (4 cups) sugar

juice of one lemon

1 Toss plums with half the sugar and lemon juice and leave to macerate for a few minutes. Very gently pick over the mulberries to remove leaves and fermenting fruits.

2 Turn plums into a pot and heat. As they warm and release their juices you can stir in the remaining sugar. Bring to a boil, moderate heat and skim. Continue stirring and skimming until the mixture has reduced to stage three. (More later on this new system, ya'll, but for now just take it to means that the preserve is almost to the jell point.)

3 Add mulberries. Return to a slow boil, shaking the pot instead of stirring to prevent the berries from sticking. Cook for at least another five minutes or until the preserve has reached the jell point. Ladle into jars, seal and process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

YIELD

3 lbs fruit yielded 2.5 pints

4 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz

NOTES

I'm undecided about the plum skins in this preserve. Next time I'd try sieving the plums before adding the mulberries. And the sugar could come down as well.