Tut Sweet

They look like blackberries and they taste like blackberries, but they aren’t even related. Blackberries belong to the Rosaceae, or rose, family. Mulberries belong to a family of their own, the Moraceae, and they grow on trees.

The idea of berries on a tree 30 feet tall takes a little getting used to, but the black or Persian mulberry ( Morus nigra ) has been harvested for thousands of years in the Near East and Europe. Many European languages even treat the blackberry as if it were a sort of mulberry. In French, blackberries are called mu^res de ronce or mu^res de haie , “bramble” or “hedgerow” mulberries. A few Eastern European languages have borrowed the Persian name, tu^t (pronounced toot ).

There’s also a native American mulberry ( M. rubra ), but its dark-red berries are nowhere near as tasty and they’re mostly eaten by birds. Finally, there’s the white mulberry ( M. alba ). People do eat white mulberries; you can buy dried white mulberries in many Iranian markets. They’re quite insipid, though.

So why are they eaten at all? Probably because they’re practically free, a byproduct of the silk industry. White mulberry trees are basically grown for their leaves, the preferred food of silkworms.