…mulberry tree.
I always thought it was a mulberry bush, but apparently I was mistaken. I parked underneath one of these trees outside one of my favorite bars — The Sharp Edge — the other day, with hundreds of perfectly ripe (and overripe) berries of a kind I’d never seen before. They looked like blackberries. They looked really good. Risking instant poisonous death, I gingerly tried one. They tasted good.
As luck would have it, inside The Sharp Edge was Laura of Upside-Down Pear who instantly and fearlessly identified them as mulberries. (Later, at home, Wikipedia concurred, thus proving once again that Laura is always right.) I resolved to pick and eat some more. And, just in case, to save one for the emergency room.
Thus, as I left the bar, I stopped to pick some berries. This proved to be a small tactical mistake, because, ripe as they were, they were raining down on me like hailstones, and it turns out that mulberry juice is very red, very dark, and very, very hard to wash off. I did eventually get clean, but my car may never be the same again.
The taste was sweet, but gentle, with almost an orange rind aroma. The texture was less pleasant; the berries fell apart in my mouth like head cheese. I’d eat them again.
But next time I’m going to make someone else go pick them.
Addendum and Question
I decided that this article would be the first one in which I would serve the included photo from Flickr. Unfortunately, it has taken so long to upload the above photo to flickr that in the interim, I have written the article, postprocessed the jpeg by hand, uploaded that to the tleaves.com server, and posted it. And made some edits. And made tea.
Is this a common Flickr experience, or am I just exceedingly unlucky tonight?
I grew up with a huge mulberry tree in my yard. To this day, my favorite picture of one of my sisters is one of her when she was about 2, covered in mulberry juice.
If they weren’t so damned messy, I’d miss them more. They make a mean berry crumble.
I’ve got a local bush and I let my 2 year old friend pick them. He loves the mess, it ups the excitement.
And I pick them carefully myself. The texture works well mixed in yogurt (ah, yogurt) or vanilla ice cream. Or chocolate, for that matter. Or pistachio.