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Barberries, to Candy
Take some preserved barberries, wash them in warm water to cleanse them from the syrup, and cover with dry finely-powdered sugar. Put them quickly into a moderately-heated oven, keeping them well sprinkled with sugar, and turning frequently.
A finishing technique rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a jar of barberries preserved in syrup and want to turn them into dry sweetmeats for dessert or cake decoration. Two things decide whether it works — the sugar you use and how gently you dry them.
- Start with the right berries"Preserved barberries" means whole berries put up in heavy sugar syrup. Barberries packed in brine or vinegar, or fresh ones, will not candy this way; fresh fruit needs to be steeped in progressively stronger syrup over several days first.
- Sourcing barberriesBerberis vulgaris was common in English hedgerows and Victorian gardens, but was widely grubbed out in the twentieth century because it hosts wheat stem rust; planting it is still restricted in parts of the United States. Dried Iranian barberries (zereshk) are the usual modern substitute and are sold by Middle Eastern grocers, though they are already dry and want plumping in syrup rather than drying out.
- "Finely-powdered sugar"In this period that means granulated sugar ground fine — what is now sold as caster or superfine sugar. Modern powdered or icing sugar contains cornstarch, which goes pasty and grey on damp fruit; use caster sugar for the coating.
- Rinse briefly and drainThe warm-water wash is only to take off the surface syrup, which would otherwise dissolve into a sticky glaze instead of a dry crust. A few seconds is enough — a long soak leaches sugar back out of the berries and leaves them limp.
- The oven temperature is the weak pointDirections of this kind are usually rendered as roughly 350F in modern terms, but that is far too hot here and the berries will caramelise and stick. What is wanted is a drying oven, in practice 150-175F, or the lowest setting your oven offers with the door propped ajar.
- Sprinkle and turnThe repeated sugaring and turning is the whole method: each layer of sugar picks up moisture from the fruit, dries, and builds the crust. Work on a rack or parchment, re-dusting periodically, and expect the process to take an hour or more; the "quickly" of the original refers to getting the berries into the oven promptly rather than to the drying time.
- Knowing when they are doneA finished candied barberry is dry and slightly gritty to the touch, with no tackiness when pressed. Any residual stickiness means moisture is still coming through, and the berries will weep in storage.
- Yield and keepingStore in an airtight tin with a little extra caster sugar, away from damp; they will keep several weeks but soften in a humid kitchen.
Barberries were a staple of the English sweetmeat and preserving cupboard from the seventeenth century onward, valued for a sharpness that most garden fruit lacks and for a scarlet colour that survives sugaring — which is why they turn up so often as a garnish on tarts, jellies and dessert plates rather than as a dish in themselves. Candying was the standard way of carrying fruit through the year before reliable canning, and books of this era treat it as a routine kitchen operation with its own graded stages of syrup. The plant's decline in Britain and America was agricultural rather than culinary: barberry is an alternate host for the fungus that causes black stem rust in wheat, and organised eradication campaigns — essentially a twentieth-century affair, with the United States programme beginning in 1918 — removed it from large parts of the countryside, while in Britain hedgerow clearance was at least as important. That is much of the reason a berry once common enough to warrant its own entry in Cassell's is now unfamiliar to English cooks while remaining an everyday ingredient in Iranian kitchens.