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Citron Preserves
Eight pounds citron, six pounds granulated sugar, three lemons, one quart water; cut the citron in any form you wish, about one-half an inch thick, boil thirty minutes in alum water, a dessert spoon of pulverized alum to one gallon water; then take them out, put them in another water and soak over night; in the morning put them in fresh water in the preserving kettle and boil them until they have changed color and are pretty soft; in the meantime slice the lemons very thin, extract the seeds, and boil them in a cup of water until soft, then take out the citron, strain the water, take one quart of it, add sugar and lemons, with the lemon water; boil slowly until the citron is transparent, then can them.
A long, patient preserve built around a fruit most cooks no longer keep: the citron melon, whose hard white flesh only becomes edible after hours of soaking and slow cooking. Two things decide the outcome — what fruit you actually use, and how the jars are finished.
- Which citronThis is citron melon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides), also sold as preserving melon or pie melon — a hard, pale-fleshed relative of the watermelon, not the citrus fruit whose peel is candied for fruitcake. Eight pounds is roughly two medium melons; peel, seed, and cut the firm flesh into half-inch slices, rings or cubes.
- AlumAlum firms the flesh by cross-linking pectin, which is why the slices survive hours of boiling without collapsing. A dessert spoon is about 2 teaspoons; use food-grade pickling alum, still sold for this purpose, and keep to the stated one spoon per gallon. It can be left out altogether — the citron will simply be softer.
- Rinse thoroughlyThe overnight soak in fresh water is not optional, and neither is a good rinse afterward. Alum left on the fruit tastes metallic and astringent and will carry through into the finished syrup.
- MeasuresA quart is 4 cups; a cup in this period is 8 fluid ounces. Note the recipe uses one quart of the citron cooking water for the syrup, not fresh water, along with the cup of lemon water.
- Sugar ratioSix pounds of sugar to eight of fruit is a true preserve, not a light compote — the sugar is doing the preserving. Reducing it substantially changes the keeping quality and the set.
- The doneness cue"Boil slowly until the citron is transparent" is the whole test. Depending on the melon this can take an hour or more of gentle simmering; the slices go from chalky white to glassy, and the syrup thickens as it goes. Rushing it at a hard boil gives cloudy, tough fruit.
- Finishing the jars"Then can them" assumes knowledge the recipe does not supply. Fill hot jars with hot fruit and syrup and process in a boiling-water bath following a current tested time for melon or fruit preserves; do not rely on inverting jars or sealing with paraffin, both of which were common when this was written.
- YieldExpect roughly six to seven pints. Served as a sweet relish or spooned over bread, cake or cottage cheese.
Citron melon was a common kitchen-garden crop in nineteenth-century America: hard, nearly flavorless, inedible raw, and a keeper that sat in the cellar until someone had time to turn it into preserves, sweet pickles, or a domestic stand-in for imported candied citron peel. Recipes like this one — boil in alum water, soak overnight, cook slowly in a heavy lemon syrup — appear across community and church cookbooks of the period with only small variations, and the lemon is doing double duty as flavor and as acid in a fruit that has almost none of its own. Alum was sold at any druggist and used freely to keep pickles and preserves crisp, a habit that faded through the twentieth century as tastes changed and its use came under closer scrutiny.