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To Pickle Barberries

A preserved pickle made from barberries, sugar, salt, and optional fennel, boiled and strained to produce a clear liquid poured over the berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and fennel work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 408 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Pickle Barberries

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. In a pot, combine the liquid with the sugar and salt.

  2. Pick the worst barberries and add them to the liquid.

  3. Boil the mixture with the worst barberries, skimming well.

  4. Boil until the mixture has a fine color, then let it cool.

  5. Strain through a clean cloth, squeezing out the juice from the berries.

  6. Let it settle, then pour the clear liquid over the barberries in the glasses.

Fill and cover

  1. Fill glasses with the best barberries until almost full.

  2. Optionally, boil a bunch of fennel in the pickle, and place a piece on top of each glass.

  3. Cover the glasses with bladder and leather.

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 + fenneltop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together408 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse raw sugar
Sweetens the pickle and helps preserve the barberries by drawing out water.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the pickle and helps preserve the barberries by drawing out water.
Barberries
The fruit being pickled, giving the pickle its tart flavor and color.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture has a fine color, then let it cool. Boiling dissolves the sugar and salt fully and concentrates the liquid, while stopping at the right color avoids over-reduction that would make the pickle too thick or dark.

“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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