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Barberries, to Preserve
To every two pounds of fruit take four and a half pounds of powdered loaf sugar, throw some of it over the barberries to be preserved, and with the remainder make a strong syrup in the proportion of a pint of water to a pound of sugar. Put the barberries into it, and make them boil as quickly as possible, that they may not lose colour; then fill the jars for use. Probable cost, 4d. to 5d. per pint.
A straightforward high-sugar fruit preserve, but the sugar ratio is heavier than anything you would meet in a modern jam book, and the fruit itself now takes some finding.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up, then pounded and sifted; "powdered" here means crushed fine, not modern powdered/icing sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute.
- The sugar ratioFour and a half pounds of sugar to two pounds of fruit is well over two to one, far above the roughly equal weights used today. Barberries are intensely sour and high in pectin, so the result keeps well.
- Syrup proportionsA pint of water to a pound of sugar is a comparatively thin syrup by modern preserving standards, though the recipe calls it 'strong'. No boiling time, setting test or temperature is given.
- Boil fast, for colourThis is the hinge of the recipe. Barberries owe their scarlet to anthocyanins that dull with prolonged heat, so the boil should be short and hard rather than a long simmer, and the pan wide enough for fast evaporation.
- Finding barberriesBerberis vulgaris is no longer a common market fruit, and in much of the United States its cultivation has long been discouraged or restricted because it hosts wheat stem rust. Dried Iranian barberries (zereshk) are widely sold but are not interchangeable here; fresh or frozen fruit is what the recipe assumes.
- Preparation of the fruitThe original gives no preparation instructions. Some period recipes call for stoning the choicest berries for a clear preserve, which is slow work and optional.
- Filling the jars"Fill the jars for use" meant hot jars sealed with paper, brandied paper or wax. Use clean hot canning jars, fill to within a quarter inch, and either process in a boiling water bath or refrigerate once opened.
Barberries were a standard English kitchen-garden fruit well into the nineteenth century, valued less for eating out of hand — they are punishingly acid — than for their sharpness and colour: pickled in vinegar, candied as sweetmeats, made into jelly for mutton and game, or used in translucent sprigs to garnish sweet dishes. Cassell's places the entry among preserves, and the enormous sugar weight is doing double duty as seasoning and as the keeping agent in a period before reliable home canning. The common barberry is an intermediate host for black stem rust of wheat, which led to an American eradication campaign in grain-growing regions from 1918 — though that does not account for the fruit's disappearance from British kitchens. The plant remains central to Persian cooking, where dried zereshk is scattered over rice.