Sometimes I find flavor and a great story when I’m not looking for it – often in the strangest of places. We have all heard the song “All Around the Mulberry Bush,” when it should be the mulberry tree.
The other evening, I was at Lewes Little League watching my two older boys, Maxwell and Bailey, play baseball. My youngest son, Palmer, was running around and playing with the other kids between innings.
It was one of those warm late-spring nights that carry the first real hint of summer. There was a light breeze drifting in from the bay. You could smell the salt in the air and hear the birds overhead. If you have spent enough evenings near the fields by Lightship Overfalls, you know that feeling.
That’s when I noticed it.
In between the fields stood a beautiful mulberry tree, its branches heavy with fruit. Some of the berries were still pale and unripe, but others had turned that deep, dark purple that signals they’re ready – soft, sweet and bursting with flavor.
I knew exactly what it was. To most people, it was probably just another tree standing quietly at the edge of the field. But to me, it felt like an invitation. A doorway back to childhood.
I picked one, and Palmer came running over to investigate. I handed him a berry and watched him hesitate for just a moment before tasting it.
Then his face changed. The surprise, then the smile.
He instantly understood he had discovered something special. I let him taste a few more, then lifted him so he could pick his own. Soon he was sharing them with another boy nearby, who was skeptical at first. The idea that you could pick fruit from a tree growing beside a baseball field and eat it felt completely foreign to him. But after a little encouragement, he tried one, and his eyes widened.
That reaction took me right back to my own childhood. As a kid, stumbling upon a mulberry tree felt like discovering buried treasure. My brothers and I would climb into its branches every summer, staining our fingers and lips purple as we ate until we couldn’t anymore. There was something magical about it – sweet, fleeting and wild.
As chefs, we spend our lives trying to preserve fleeting moments of flavor. So after the game, I gathered as many mulberries as I could and brought them home.
I added sugar to the berries to extract their sweet juices and preserve the flavor for later use. The result tasted like summer. At the time, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it.
Then I remembered a bottle of Maryland rye whiskey I had recently picked up at The Grog Shop. I immediately knew the mulberry syrup belonged in an old-fashioned – one of the purest cocktail expressions there is: spirit, sweetness and bitters.
For the bitters, I reached for a batch of black walnut bitters I made at the end of last summer. The preserved mulberry brought bright sweetness and deep fruit flavor, while the rye offered warmth and spice. The black walnut bitters added earthy, floral and nutty notes. It was the perfect nightcap, layered with a sense of time, place and memory.
Standing in my kitchen that evening, stirring that glass, I kept thinking about that tree between the fields. How many people had walked past it without noticing? How many small gifts like that surround us every day?
Sometimes the most meaningful ingredients aren’t imported from somewhere far away or bought from specialty markets.
Sometimes they’re growing quietly beside a baseball field, waiting for someone curious enough to stop. And sometimes all it takes is handing your youngest son his first mulberry under a late-spring sky to remind you that the best flavors – and the best stories – have been there all along.
