Why it works: Sugar and mulberry work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Mulberries
Ingredients
Directions
Make the juice
Heat the mulberries in a preserving pan to extract a pint of juice.
Make the syrup
Mix the sugar with the strained juice and bring to a boil.
Skim the syrup.
Add the ripe mulberries.
Let the mulberries sit in the syrup until warm.
Boil gently until half done.
Set aside in the syrup until the next day.
Boil gently again until the syrup thickens and can stand in round drops when cold.
Transfer the mulberries to a pot for storage.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Sugar + mulberrytop 23% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together17 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Sweetens the jam and, at high concentration, helps the syrup thicken and preserve the fruit.
- Mulberries
- Provide the fruit flavor, color and pectin-free bulk that forms the jam's body.
- Mulberry juice
- Supplies liquid that dissolves the sugar and forms the base of the syrup.
The step that matters
Boil gently again until the syrup thickens. Jam sets when enough sugar and water have evaporated to reach a thick syrup. Testing whether drops stand in round shapes when cold shows whether it is ready; stopping too early leaves runny jam and boiling too long can make it stiff or scorch.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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