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Barberry Jam
Allow one-quarter pound sugar to each quart ripe berries. Mash them; mix with sugar (no water) and boil till no scum rises. Cook an hour or over, always. The jam may be put up as it is, or made into marmalade, mashed through a coarse sieve. Added to fig or pear or apple the jam proves a source of pleasing variety in flavour.
SYRUP OF BARBERRIES (For Drinks, etc.) Cook berries till soft and clear, then cook with syrup as for Cranberry Syrup, mashing berries; straining and returning to fire to cook again before bottling. This sy rup may be used for ices, puddings, etc., or combined, as is currant or cranberry or lemon juice, with other fruits for jellies, pies, or other "dishes." With raisins, pears, figs, or apples it is particularly good for tarts.
RED CURRANT JELLY No. I Pick the fruit on a dry day before the currants are quite ripe. Stem them and scald over boiling water (in an inner vessel), then let the currants remain an hour over a moderate fire. Pour into a jelly bag without crushing and let drip over night. Place juice in preserving kettle and let boil ten minutes. Skim, and when just at a boil stir in the sugar, having measured the cold juice and allowing for each full pint one and one-fourth pounds sugar (heated). This should jell by the time sugar is dissolved, requiring never more than five minutes. Let stand in sun several days.
A page of three related preparations, all built on the same principle: barberries are so acidic and so rich in pectin that they need very little help to set. The chief adjustments are storage and heat control.
- The sugar is startlingly lowA quarter pound of sugar to a quart of berries is roughly 4 oz sugar to a pound or so of fruit — somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of what a modern preserve carries. Expect something closer to a sharp fruit butter than a sweet jam, and expect it to keep far less well than a conventional jam.
- Storage is the real changeAt that sugar level the jam is not shelf-stable by modern standards, high acid or not. Refrigerate it and use within a few weeks, or fill clean hot jars and process in a boiling-water bath (10 minutes for half-pints, longer at altitude). The same applies to the syrup, which the original simply says to bottle.
- "Boil till no scum rises" and "an hour or over"With no water added, an hour of boiling on a modern burner will scorch. Use a wide heavy pan, start over low heat until the berries release their juice, and stir often once it thickens. The hour is about reducing and driving off water, not about achieving a set — barberries gel quickly.
- A quart of berriesFresh barberries run light; a quart measure is roughly 1 to 1.25 lb. The recipe measures fruit by volume and sugar by weight, which is normal for the period but worth converting before you begin.
- Sieving for marmaladeBarberries carry one or two hard seeds each. Pushing the cooked jam through a coarse sieve, as directed, removes them and is worth doing unless you like the crunch. Do it while the jam is hot.
- "As for Cranberry Syrup"The syrup instruction is a cross-reference to another recipe elsewhere in the book. In practice: cook the berries soft, add sugar syrup, mash, strain, return to the heat to reduce, then bottle. Cranberry is the closest modern stand-in for both flavour and behaviour.
- The currant jelly's sun-standingLetting the jelly stand in the sun for several days was how it was finished, the heat and evaporation completing the set. There is no reason to do it now, and dust and insects are the obvious objection.
- YieldScaled up, two quarts of berries should give roughly a pint to a pint and a half of finished jam, depending how far you reduce it.
Barberries — the fruit of Berberis vulgaris, a thorny European shrub long naturalised in North America — were once a standard hedgerow preserve, valued for a sourness closer to cranberry or unripe currant than to any garden fruit. That acidity, plus abundant natural pectin, is why the recipe wants no water and no lemon. Their near-disappearance from American cooking has a specific cause: common barberry is an alternate host for wheat stem rust, and a federal eradication campaign begun around 1918 removed hundreds of millions of bushes across the grain states, with planting restrictions that persist in some places. A book of fruit recipes from before or around that period treats the berry as an ordinary thing to have in the kitchen; the note that it improves fig, pear or apple is the honest reason it survived so long, since barberry was as much a souring agent as a fruit in its own right. Dried barberries, still central to Persian cooking as zereshk, are the easiest source today.