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Dessert

Barberry Marmalade

A preserve made from ripe barberries, sugar, and water, simmered until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Barberry Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the barberries

  1. Boil the barberries in ¼ pint of cold water without crushing them until soft.

  2. Remove the barberries and use the cooking water, adding fresh water to make 1 pint of syrup.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the syrup with 1½ pounds of sugar.

  2. Add the barberries to the syrup and boil for 15 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Barberries
Provide the tart fruit flavour and the pectin-rich body that lets the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at this concentration, helps it thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Boiling the barberries without crushing them. Keeping the fruit whole while it softens preserves its texture and lets the cooking water carry the flavour and pectin into the syrup, which helps the marmalade set.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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