Bonding over a berry!

Mostly eaten fresh off the tree, mulberry jam is also popular and tastes delicious as a spread on bread or as a dressing on cakes, pancakes and puddings, writes Lesley D Biswas

As the season of spring unveils its canvas of natural splendour, among the many joys of a childhood spent in the countryside, springtime holds a special place in my heart, albeit for another reason. So while the forests surrounding McCluskiegunj blushed with fiery orange palash and crimson silk cotton blooms that contrasted beautifully with subtle emerald shades of tender new leaves, for me the real attraction stood in our own backyard, where for the past four decades a black mulberry tree has been serving us a bounty of sweet, succulent berries.

Standing tall among other fruit trees like plum and peach that also bear fruit during springtime, over the years the mulberry has come to epitomise how sharing food can unify people. Except, in this case, the bonding over mulberry extended beyond neighbours and our local community, to include the wild creatures that lived in the vicinity. Standing beneath its branches laden with juicy ripe mulberries, as we chatted and shared stories, overhead, it was a different kind of spring feast with squirrels and birds making the most of the brief period while the fruit lasted, which was barely a few weeks in the month of March.

A medium-sized deciduous tree of the Morus genus native to western Asia, the black mulberry (Morus nigra) is regarded as more flavourful than its red and white variants. Yet largely underrated in the family of berries we regularly consume, the humble purplish-black fruit is quite impressive for its health benefits. Low in calories, fat and helpful in cutting cholesterol levels, mulberry is also an excellent source of vitamins, especially of the B-complex group, as well as Vitamin C, A, E and is rich in antioxidants, iron, potassium, manganese and magnesium.

Mostly eaten fresh off the tree, mulberry jam is also popular and tastes delicious as a spread on bread or as a dressing on cakes, pancakes and puddings. My mum’s mulberry jam is a quick and easy recipe comprising fresh mulberry, sugar and lemon juice. Gathering the fruit entails spreading a clean sheet beneath the tree branches and gently shaking the branches to detach the ripe, caterpillar-like fruit which easily plops down onto the sheet staining it with its sticky, purplish juice. After washing the fruit, and removing the stems, to four cups of fruit add the juice of one lemon and bring to a boil in a saucepan. Reduce to medium flame, add two cups of sugar and cook until it becomes the consistency of jam. Once cooled, you can bottle this jam and preserve it for more than a season. But as children, we saved mum that bother and finished it within a few days of her preparing the jam, only to find another batch ready and waiting on the kitchen shelf for us to dig in.

For a community fond of baking, a mixture of fresh mulberries, sugar and all-purpose flour tossed together was a welcome change to our regular mince-meat and mixed fruit pie fillings.

And given the bitterly cold winters we had to endure, homemade wines were always in demand and mulberry lent itself to this as well. But my everlasting fond memory of the mulberry goes back to when monsoon season arrived and people who had savoured the delicious fruit earlier that year would return with a request for cuttings of the mulberry tree. Cutting is known to root more easily than seed and dad would gladly oblige them. For the mulberry rightfully belonged to the local community!