Barberries

Common barberries in November; leaves have fallen off the branch.

The ripe barberries hanging along the stream were so tantalizingly scarlet that, even though I'd read that barberries are similar to cranberries and even though I'm not a big fan of cranberry sauce, I had to try barberry sauce. My recipe called for four cups of berries, and I made two trips with two different sons to pluck the ripe fruits from among the thorny bushes. In retrospect, wearing my knee-high rubber boots would have made the picking a lot more efficient; the berries mostly drooped over steep banks, and I was often clinging perilously close to a sudden splash in the water as I picked. There were some berries I simply couldn't reach, but by gingerly bending the thorny, low-hanging branches toward me on the bank, I was able to collect the berries I needed for my recipe.

My oldest son looks into the stream from a bridge.
Some barberries are hanging over the water's edge on the right.

The recipe was from Wild Food by Roger Phillips. I chose it because I didn't really know what else to make with the barberries. I love cranberries in baked goods, but barberries have seeds that must be removed before consumption, and there's just no good way to get the seed out without using the berry in a sauce or jelly -- at least not as far as I could figure out (but read on for subsequent findings). So, with Thanksgiving coming up, I decided to try a barberry sauce.

Barberries don't taste great right off the bush. My reference books all warned me of this, so I wasn't too disappointed when my own experimentation confirmed what I'd read, and I remained hopeful about the sauce. I placed the washed and stemmed berries in a saucepan along with two cut-up whole oranges and covered it all with water according to the recipe. After cooking the fruit and straining out the orange peel,  pulp, and barberry seeds, I reheated the sauce and added a bit of pectin and some sugar. Then it was time for the taste test.

It was ... passable. And really, considering that I don't care for cranberry sauce and don't like marmalade because of the orange-peel taste, the fact that I took a second taste after the first taste (albeit just to ascertain whether I actually disliked it and whether what I disliked was barberry or orange peel) is fair praise. But I was definitely asking myself why I hadn't heeded my gut feeling about those whole oranges. Next time I make this sauce, I plan to add some grated orange peel and orange juice but leave out the rind.

There will be a next time, though. I decided to test the sauce on my mother, who likes cranberry sauce and marmalade, and she said it was good. I thus put it on the table with our Thanksgiving turkey, and my niece and youngest son kept going back for more. I thought it tasted pretty good on the turkey too, I have to admit, and a post-Thanksgiving turkey sandwich with some barberry mayonnaise did hit the spot.

I've now done a little searching online, and I've discovered several recipes for barberry pilaf, as well as barberry cornmeal cake, barberry tarts, and barberry pies. Some recipes call for dried barberries, which apparently are available in Middle Eastern grocery stores. All of this piqued my interest considerably because it would seem that any of these recipes would require seedless barberries. Indeed, I discovered that there is a variety of seedless barberry that grows in the Middle East, but I also found a description of what seemed to be a painstaking method of removing the one to three seeds contained in each sunflower-seed-sized fruit: partially dry the berries and then split them with a knife and poke out the seeds with the knife tip or a needle. Hmm. I'm pretty sure I have better things to do, actually.

Barberries weren't the only wild food on my table at Thanksgiving. I also substituted wild spinach (a.k.a. lambs quarters) for half of the spinach in one of my favorite dishes, Boursin-creamed spinach. I would have substituted all of the spinach except that I didn't have that much wild spinach in my freezer.

Because the turkey ran out before the barberry sauce, half of sauce ended up in my freezer. Tonight, as I was writing this, I decided I needed to find something to do with it other than serve it with my Thanksgiving turkey; otherwise, I won't need to pick any more barberries next year or try a different variation of the sauce. I searched online for recipes involving cranberry sauce and found this one for morning-after cranberry-sauce muffins. I doubled the recipe and substituted my barberry sauce (plus a half cup of autumberry jelly to make up what I was lacking in sauce) for the cranberry sauce. The muffins are still warm as I write this, and my eldest son and I have just had a sample. Although it might be a bit too much work to first make barberry sauce and then make the muffins just for the sake of eating the muffins, they are tasty, and I would recommend this use for leftover sauce should you have any. One caution, though, is that the cooking time in the recipe was given as 20-22 min, and my muffins were overcooked at 20 min. I tried 18 min for the second batch, and that seemed to be about right.

In other cooking adventures, I'm excited to report that I finally, and unexpectedly, got a chance to use the cookbook From Pest to Pesto, which I ordered in May but did not get to try at the time. Published by the Kalamazoo Nature Center in Michigan, the book aims to get people excited about cooking with garlic mustard so that they might help to stem its rapid, invasive spread. Unfortunately, the garlic mustard had all gone to seed by the time my book arrived, so I thought I'd have to wait for next year to try any of the recipes. However, some warm weather in the early fall convinced the garlic mustard to sprout again, and I was able to gather some leaves and roots to make the pesto (check out my April 22 post for pictures of garlic mustard).

It was fairly simple to make, and in no time I had a blender full of garlicky-smelling green paste. My first taste left me sorely disappointed; after the rave reviews I'd read of this pesto, I was hoping for a miraculous transformation of flavor from the pungent leaves to a tasty pesto. How this transformation could have occurred, I don't know; the pesto's main ingredient was indeed garlic-mustard leaves, so what else would I expect it to taste like? In any case, I thought the pesto was fairly disgusting but forged ahead with adding it to hot pasta as directed, just in case.

It turns out that the miraculous transformation occurs in the hot-pasta step. The pasta with pesto was delicious. My two youngest sons and I all happily ate large servings for lunch. I'm looking forward to trying some of the other recipes in the book next spring -- and simultaneously combating the spread of garlic mustard around my house!