You'd be better off asking angel, if his mods are involved, you can be sure he's changed so much stuff about my mods that I've lost track of what's what.
In bob's mods, the barrelling recipes have been changed to work in the pumps rather than the assembling machines, The "Vanilla barrelling" option adds the barrelling crafting categories to the assembling machines so that you can barrel things there.
And no, they don't use a furnace recipe, you just select a barrel filling or emptying recipe from the list. or in the case of the air pump, could also choose the option to pump compressed air. If you have no options in the recipes list, it's likely angel's mods doing something with it.