Mulberry Pie

Mulberries are a much maligned and under appreciated berry. This is probably because the mulberry tree grows along fence-lines and in farm ditches, in odd spots mixed in with other desirable and purposely planted shrubs. It is not a pretty tree, being scraggly and having a nasty habit of uneven branch growth. Because of its propensity to root itself in borderline places, the berries seem to always be underfoot. In our area in the spring, where recreational trails have been cut through woods bordering farm fields, the trails become slick and smeared with the deep purple juice. The mulberry tree is definitely a nuisance.

During the first spring in a new house, we determined that the ugly tree growing awkwardly at the foot of our driveway was indeed a mulberry. It didn’t bear many berries that year, as a late frost had decimated almost all the fruit bearing trees in our area. The berries it did bear were small and quickly snatched up by birds and deer.

The second spring, however, the tree burst forth into gorgeous purple-black berries, some an inch long, sweet and juicy. I watched with dismay as the berries fell onto the driveway and left dark stains that would get on our tires and our shoes. Bees, ants and flies, attracted to the oozing juices, swarmed around the tree. I spied deer in the middle of the day nibbling on the lowest branches. The birds fought over the berries, knocking more to the ground. I finally decided to take action: I would harvest the berries and make pie.

Some people don’t know what to do with a mulberry. I am one of the lucky people who does. I have rich memories of gathering mulberries from trees that grew in the ditches along the gravel road near my grandparent’s farm in Kansas. On summer visits, my mother, sister and I would gather the berries in small bowls and present them to my grandmother who would effortlessly produce a culinary miracle---a mulberry rhubarb pie. The combination of the dark sweet berries with the tart rhubarb was a perfect yin and yang. Somehow, Grandma concocted a custard filling that baked to creamy sweetness with the fruit. It was the best possible kind of pie---fruit and cream, flaky homemade crust, an occasional stem from the mulberry testifying to its home-scratch origin.

Of course, no recipe had been written down to document the wonder of Grandma’s rhubarb-mulberry pie. She never had a recipe outside of her own head. It seemed such a simple thing to accomplish that none of us thought to make her tell us her method. So I set about doing what the new century cook does---I got online. I searched through several recipe databases, and found recipes for mulberry pie: Mulberry-strawberry, mulberry alone. None of them definitely matched what I remembered, so I decided to combine a few recipes and see what happened. The result left my family groaning and speechless with pleasure at the table. The rich, sweet mulberries combined with the tang of the strawberries I used, and the creamy custard filling evoked my Grandmother’s magic.

We enjoyed a couple of pies that summer, and one in the fall from berries I had frozen. Then, one weekend when my husband was home alone, he cut the tree down. It had been on his list of things to do. I knew it, and had agreed that it needed to be done. It obscured the house from the road with its ugly, variably growing branches. Several large branches had died and lost their leaves prematurely. Still, rational though the decision was, I felt a tug of loss, like a connection with my past had been loosened. For a brief time, those nuisance berries had revived memories of my girlhood and of my long-passed grandmother, and of a time when recipes were remembered and all I had to do was turn over the berries with my purple stained fingers and be rewarded with a pie.