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Barberry Jelly
4 quarts barberries. 1/2 pound seedless raisins 1 dozen large sour apples Sugar as needed 3 oranges Cut the apples in quarters, and the oranges in shreds; add the barberries and enough water to barely cover the whole and let boil until the apples are soft; drain and measure. Take three fourths a cup of sugar for each cup of juice. Set the liquid over the fire to boil and the sugar into the oven to heat; add the raisins to the juice, let boil twenty minutes, and skim out the raisins to use in some other dish; add the hot sugar and stir thoroughly, then skim and boil until the syrup jellies in drops when poured from the spoon.
A mixed-fruit jelly set by pectin from apples and barberries rather than by added pectin. The whole thing turns on the sheeting test at the end.
- The barberry quantityThe ingredient list as printed gives raisins, apples and oranges but no measure for the barberries themselves, though the method calls for them. Some figure has to be supplied; in the absence of one, a couple of quarts of barberries to a dozen apples is a reasonable starting point, adjusted to taste.
- Sourcing barberriesCommon barberry (Berberis vulgaris) is rare in North American markets and is restricted or banned for planting in several states as an alternate host of wheat stem rust. Dried Iranian barberries (zereshk) are widely sold but will not supply the same pectin or juice volume; fresh or frozen fruit is what this recipe assumes.
- Sour applesChoose hard, tart, underripe apples with skins and cores left in. Granny Smith, Bramley or windfall crabapples all work. The pectin lives in the cores and peel, so quartering without peeling or coring is the point, not laziness.
- DrainingDrip the cooked fruit through a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth without squeezing. Pressing gives more juice but a cloudy set. Expect this to take several hours; overnight is normal.
- Heating the sugarWarming sugar so it dissolves without dropping the boil is sound practice. The recipe names no oven setting; spread the sugar in a shallow pan in a low oven only until it is warm to the touch, and stir it into the juice immediately.
- The raisinsThey are boiled in the juice for flavour and then removed. Twenty minutes leaves them plump and syrupy; they are good in a steamed pudding or scattered over porridge.
- Testing the set"Jellies in drops" is the sheet test: lift the spoon, and when the last drops run together and fall as a single sheet rather than two separate drops, it is done. A thermometer reading of 220F at sea level says the same thing more reliably.
- Yield and keepingA dozen apples plus barberries will give roughly 6 to 8 half-pint jars, depending on how much juice drains. Pour into sterilised jars, and process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath for shelf storage; otherwise refrigerate.
Barberries were a standard hedgerow and dooryard fruit in New England and northern Europe, valued precisely for the qualities that make them unpopular now: fierce acidity, high pectin and a colour that survives cooking. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks list barberry jelly, barberry conserve and barberries preserved in sugar as accompaniments to game and roast meats, and the pickled sprays were used as a garnish. The bush's decline in the United States was not culinary but agricultural: common barberry hosts the wheat stem rust fungus, and a federal eradication campaign beginning in 1918 pulled out many millions of bushes across the grain-growing states, which is a large part of why the fruit disappeared from American kitchens within a generation. The raisins and oranges here add sweetness and body to a juice that on its own would be almost undrinkably sharp.