Home › Preserving › Barberry Jelly
Barberry Jelly
Use two quarts of apples for every four quarts of barberries and just enough water to keep berries from burning. Follow directions for Currant Jelly.
A two-line recipe that assumes you have already read the currant jelly entry a few pages earlier. What it is really telling you is a ratio: barberries are ferociously acidic but only moderately rich in pectin, so half their volume in apples goes in to build the set.
- The hinge: apples go in wholeThe apples: the recipe does not say how to prepare them. Common jelly practice was to quarter them with skins, cores and seeds intact, since that is where most of the pectin sits; they are strained out with the pulp at the jelly-bag stage.
- What the quarts meanFruit is measured by volume, not weight. Four quarts of barberries works out to roughly 4 lb and two quarts of apples to roughly 2.5 lb, though both are approximations. The recipe does not specify the kind of apple.
- "Just enough water to keep berries from burning"A small amount only, added at the start over low heat until the berries begin to run their own juice. Barberries are small and dry-skinned and will scorch faster than currants.
- The currant jelly directions being referred toThe currant jelly directions being referred to are not reproduced here. The standard method of the period was to simmer the fruit until soft, crush lightly, drip through a scalded flannel or muslin bag without squeezing, then boil the juice with sugar. Squeezing the bag gives a cloudy jelly.
- SugarThe usual period rule for currant jelly was about a cup of sugar to a cup of juice, warmed before it goes in. This recipe gives no sugar quantity of its own.
- Testing the setWhere the original says boil until it jellies, use a thermometer: 220F at sea level, or 8F above the boiling point of water where you are. A chilled saucer test confirms it.
- SealingOld jelly was poured into tumblers and sealed with melted paraffin, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Use canning jars and a five- to ten-minute boiling-water bath, or treat the jelly as a refrigerator preserve.
- Sourcing the fruitCommon barberry (Berberis vulgaris) is restricted or prohibited in several US states because of its role in wheat stem rust, and Japanese barberry is banned as invasive in others. Check local rules before planting or foraging; dried Iranian zereshk is the usual substitute, though it will not set the same way.
Barberry hedges were once a common sight in New England dooryards, and the scarlet berries — too sour to eat out of hand, high in acid, ripening after the first frosts — went almost entirely into jelly, conserve and a sauce served with mutton and game. Their fortunes changed sharply not long after this book appeared: common barberry is an alternate host for wheat stem rust, and the federal barberry eradication campaign launched in 1918 pulled up millions of bushes across the grain states, which is a large part of why the fruit vanished from American kitchens within a generation. Lowney's Cook Book, compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in 1907, is remembered for its chocolate work, but its preserving chapter is a straightforward record of what a New England household actually put up, hedgerow fruit included. The instruction to lean on a neighbouring recipe rather than repeat it is typical of the era's compression: jelly-making was assumed knowledge, and only the ratios needed writing down.