My fingers and fingernails are stained dramatically purple-black, which earned me some strange looks in the bodega this morning when I went to buy milk; this is the result of an escapade instigated by Miss Ashley of macaroni and monogram fame. An email from her friend Michael asking for volunteer fruit pickers inspired her to sign up for a backbreaking stint of manual labor at the Queens County farm this past saturday. Well, that was the theory, but in practice she got there just a wee bit late and all the picking had been done. Oh dear, oh dear, quelle dommage (ahem). Undeterred, she called me and uttered the magic word (”mulberries”) and so yesterday we toddled off to the Unfancy Food Show on South 6th to show support for the farm’s stand there.

mulberries and salad cups fresh from the farm

As well as the spectacular berries, they had lettuces, cucumbers, gorgeous baby fennel, free range eggs and pork for sale, all products of the farm’s 47 acres - New York City’s “largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland”, according to their website. As I’m in the middle of a marmalade making marathon (more on that later), I wanted something other than jam to do with the mulberries. Mulberry wine seemed to be another popular option in my older cookbooks, but I wasn’t sure this was the time to freak out the neighbors and tackle home fermentation either. In the end, the indomitable Constance Spry came up trumps.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have tackled the mulberry de-stemming late last night after a day spent in the sunshine drinking the Queens farm’s basil sweet tea cocktails. But I think a little berry juice gives Connie a nice patina, and I was going to clean the kitchen floor anyway.

After you’ve strained them out, you can use the gin-soaked berries to make your own sweet tea cocktails. Be patient with the gin, though: as our Constance says grandly, “This improves with keeping.” Mum’s fiendish damson gin, which has left many an unsuspecting dinner guest snockered, never debuts right away; she keeps it lurking in the back of the pantry until it’s reached its own Golden Ratio of potency and flavor, then brings it out as a post-prandial digestif. So if you try your mulberry gin and find it a little underwhelming, cork it up again and ignore it for another three months or so. I intend to launch this batch next summer, when mulberries are back in season and I can pair tiny liquer glasses of the gin with some of the fresh fruit, scented leaf geranium sorbet and paper thin almond crisps. For now, I’m off to scrub my hands for the thirty-sixth time and tackle the kitchen floor.

newly streaky Spry