when life hands you mulberries

I was caught sticky-handed the other morning, a Santa Monica farmer’s market morning. By 9 o’clock the vegetables were sweating and only the vendors stood cool, shaded by their tents and offering samples of pistachios and peaches even though the regulars passing by have had pistachio samples by the dozen and everyone, absolutely everyone, takes more than one piece of peach. It’s nearly Halloween but you’d never know it from the copious heirloom tomatoes still littering the market stalls and the car thermometer reading a defiant 92°.

The Weiser family farm’s stall is the reliable king of root vegetables at the market, with heaps of potatoes and rainbow-colored carrots standing as a testament to Thanksgiving all year long. But that morning the Weisers, too, were peddling summer. Farmer-in-chief Alex called me over from behind the potato table just as I was eying a “Last Chance yellow peaches” sign across the way. “Hey, I’ve got your mulberries! They’re melting!” he shouted. From a jumble of empty boxes he produced a tin tray of mostly frozen oblong maroon berries, like an obvious cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. Back in the spring I mentioned to Alex that I’d never tasted a mulberry and sometime in late June, while I was snapping photos of monkeys in Rwanda, he stashed a bunch in the freezer for me. There must have been ten cups in the tray (I later learn he sold these berries for $25 a pound) and we both let a few dissolve into flavors that are tart, wine-y and woody as he tells me that these Persian mulberries are actually not cousins of the raspberry or blackberry clan. Mulberries grow on trees, famous throughout the Middle East and similarly warm climes for providing shade along the streets. “Wouldn’t it be great if LA had mulberry trees for shade!” he exclaimed. As the deep purple juice stains my fingers and also my tote bag, I try to imagine Angelenos lounging on the sidewalks of Santa Monica, trying to catch falling mulberries in their mouths. Or, more likely, ridding them with their front windshield wipers.

Back at home, I’m lost and confused. My trusted Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook lists only two mulberry recipes, both requiring an ice cream maker, and an epicurious.com search turns up nothing at all. I stare down the tray and wonder if I should eat them all plain, or over yogurt perhaps. Or bake a pie? Or stick them back in the freezer and avoid the whole leaking mess? Nope, into the pot with sugar they went. When confronted with a precious summer fruit and the dwindling autumnal heat there’s only one thing to do: make preserves.


Alex apologized for pushing the flat of mulberries on me the next time I saw him, or rather for the hours I spent mid-week stirring the mulberry pot with a spoon. “I know,” I shook my head, “you think it’d be no time at all, but it always ends up taking the whole day!” I could hardly fault him though--this wasn’t my first preservation project of the past few weeks, nor was it the last. Plum-vanilla bean jam, pickled watermelon rind, roasted red peppers, quince butter… I jarred it all.

It’s been like trying to step simultaneously on a dozen helium balloons, getting all this produce into Bell glass containers while keeping up with graduate school work. Just yesterday I bought eight of the “Last Chance” peaches and with a smudge of guilt spent a good part of my Sunday afternoon cooking them down to mush and sequestering the peach preserves into sterilized half-pints. I have a rather large stash of summer preserved in my kitchen now, as if to say that Southern California won’t yield fruit for the next eight months (never mind that here in LA we’re just weeks away from the first local citrus harvest). But I’ll be relieved if summer has finally set on the farmer’s markets: I have papers to write and besides, I’ve run out of jars.


Wendell Berry once wrote that “The only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity.” Though I can’t say for sure, I like to think he was responding to Thoreau’s earlier declaration: “In wildness is the preservation of the World.” Regardless of whether they were actually in dialogue, wildness has rarely since been captured as wisely in words.

So in domesticity, shall we say, is the preservation of fruit.