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Barberry Jelly
Follow the recipe for Currant Jelly, allowing one cup of water to each peck of barberries.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already have the currant jelly method in front of you: crush the fruit, heat it with just enough water to keep it from scorching, drip the juice through a jelly bag, then boil it with sugar to the setting point. The only thing being adjusted here is the water, and the amount is startlingly small.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of eight quarts, which for small berries works out to roughly 10-12 lb of fruit. One cup of water to that quantity is barely a film in the bottom of the pot, so the pan must be heavy and the heat low until the berries begin to give up their own juice.
- Barberries are exceptionally sourThe fruit of Berberis is high in acid and is generally reckoned a good setting fruit, so it needs little help to jell. Expect to use about a cup of sugar to each cup of strained juice, as with currants, and taste the finished jelly before assuming it needs less.
- Don't squeeze the bagLet the crushed fruit drip through the jelly bag unaided, even if it takes several hours. Pressing forces pulp and sediment through and gives a cloudy jelly, which matters more here than in a jam.
- Boil the juice shortThe sugared juice will often sheet off a spoon after only a short hard boil, so start testing early rather than working to a fixed time. Overcooking dulls the colour from clear scarlet toward brown and makes the set rubbery.
- Finding the fruitEuropean barberry is uncommon in North American markets; dried barberries (zereshk) sold in Persian groceries are the same fruit, but dried fruit will not behave the same way in a jelly. Fresh or frozen fruit is what this recipe assumes.
- SealingThe book's era relied on paraffin poured over the jelly in open glasses, which is no longer recommended because mould can grow beneath the wax. Follow current water-bath processing guidance for jellies instead.
- YieldNo yield is given. A peck of fruit will still strain to a good deal of juice, which with equal sugar makes a considerable quantity of jelly — worth scaling the recipe down unless you have a large crop.
Barberry jelly appears in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a tart, clear preserve served with mutton and game, filling much the same role as currant or crab apple jelly — which is exactly why Butterick treats it as a variation on the currant recipe rather than giving it a method of its own. The common barberry, Berberis vulgaris, was brought to New England by early European settlers as a hedge plant and naturalised widely, so the berries were a dooryard crop rather than a market purchase. Its disappearance from American kitchens has a specific cause: the shrub is an alternate host for wheat stem rust, and federal and state eradication campaigns beginning around 1918 pulled up barberry hedges across the grain-growing states over several decades. Recipes like this one survive from the period just before the plant became a liability.