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Barberry Marmalade
Take one pound of nice ripe barberries; boil, but do not crush them, in a quarter of a pint of cold water. When they are sufficiently soft remove them from the pan, and use the water, with enough fresh, to make a pint of syrup. Boil it with a pound and a half of sugar; then put in the fruit and boil for fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 4d. to 5d. per pint.
A plain high-sugar preserve of the sort Cassell's expected any household to run off in a spare hour. The difficulties today are sourcing the fruit and reading the Victorian measures, not the method.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint here is 5 fl oz (about 140 ml), and the finished pint of syrup is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz (about 570 ml). American cooks working in 16 fl oz pints will end up with a stiffer, more concentrated result.
- The fruitThese are the berries of Berberis vulgaris, small, scarlet, intensely sour and full of seeds — not Japanese barberry hedging fruit and not the same as barberry root or bark. Fresh ones are rare in Britain and largely unavailable in the United States, where the shrub was cleared as an alternate host for wheat stem rust and remains restricted in some states. Dried Iranian barberries (zereshk) are the practical substitute; soak them first and expect to add more water.
- "Boil, but do not crush"This is the hinge. The berries are softened whole so the marmalade sets with recognisable fruit suspended in clear syrup rather than collapsing into pulp. Keep the initial boil gentle and lift them out with a slotted spoon.
- Sugar ratioA pound and a half of sugar to a pound of fruit is high even by preserving standards, but barberries are extremely acid and are generally reckoned a reasonable source of pectin, so a set should come readily and the sweetness is needed to make the thing edible. Do not reduce the sugar much without expecting a looser, sharper preserve.
- Judging the setFifteen minutes at a rolling boil will usually bring it to setting point, but boiling times vary with pan width. Test at 105C/220F, or chill a spoonful on a cold saucer and push it with a finger to see if it wrinkles.
- SeedsBarberries are seedy, and the original leaves them in. If that bothers you, press the softened fruit through a nylon sieve before combining with the syrup — the result is a jelly-like conserve rather than a marmalade with whole fruit.
- Jars and keepingPot boiling hot into hot sterilised jars and seal at once. At this sugar concentration the preserve keeps well in a cool dark cupboard; refrigerate after opening.
Barberries were a standard English preserving fruit from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, valued precisely for the sourness that makes them unpalatable raw: they were pickled, candied as sweetmeats, made into jelly to eat with mutton, and used as a garnish, the scarlet sprigs laid over roast meats and tarts. Cassell's includes several barberry entries because the shrub was still a common hedgerow and garden plant in Britain when the Dictionary was compiled in the 1870s. Its disappearance from British and American kitchens has two causes usually given: the systematic eradication campaigns against the shrub as a host of wheat stem rust, which in the United States ran on a national scale into the twentieth century, and the cheapening of imported citrus and cane sugar, which pushed sharp native fruits out of the preserving pan. The costing — fourpence to fivepence a pint — is a reminder of what the book was for: a household manual for readers who needed to know whether a preserve was worth making before they started.