Home › Preserves › Citron Preserves
Citron Preserves
Pare off rind, seed, cut in thin slices two inches long, weigh, and put in preserving kettle with water enough to cover; boil one hour, take out the melon, and to the water in kettle add as much sugar as there is melon by weight, boil until quite thick, replace melon, add two sliced lemons to each pound of fruit, boil twenty minutes, take out, boil syrup until it is very thick molasses, and pour it over the fruit. Mrs. J. H. Robinson, Kenton, Ohio.
A nineteenth-century preserve built on the citron melon, not the candied citrus peel of fruitcake fame. The method is the old two-stage one: cook the fruit tender, build the syrup separately, then marry them.
- What the citron isThis is Citrullus lanatus var. citroides, the preserving or stock melon, a hard white-fleshed relative of watermelon grown specifically because it stays firm through long boiling. It is rare in shops now; seed catalogues still carry it, and firm underripe watermelon rind or a hard winter squash behaves similarly, though neither gives the same glassy translucence.
- The lemon ratio is probably not literalTwo sliced lemons per pound of fruit would give a preserve that is mostly lemon, and the phrasing may well mean two lemons to the whole batch. Start at one lemon per two pounds and taste.
- Preserving kettleIn the 1870s typically a wide, heavy brass, copper or enamelled pan. Use a wide stainless or enamelled pot; the width matters more than the material because evaporation is what thickens the syrup. Avoid bare aluminium or cast iron with this much lemon.
- "Boil one hour"That is a guide, not a rule. Cook the slices until a skewer passes through with no resistance and the flesh has gone translucent at the edges. Citron melon can take an hour; watermelon rind is usually tender in twenty to thirty minutes.
- "Thick as molasses" means a temperature"Boil syrup until it is very thick molasses" -- the book gives no temperature. In modern terms this is somewhere at or a little above the usual jam setting point, roughly 220-222F (104-106C) at sea level, or when a spoonful sheets rather than drips. Boiled much further the syrup will set hard on cooling.
- Sugar by weightEqual weights of sugar and prepared fruit, weighed after paring and seeding. That is the whole preservation strategy here, so do not reduce it; a low-sugar version will not keep on a shelf.
- SealingThe recipe stops at pouring the syrup over the fruit and says nothing about closures; period practice was hot jars, hot syrup and a covering of paper or wax. Current practice is to pack boiling hot into sterilised jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or simply to refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
- YieldAbout one pint of finished preserve per pound of prepared melon, give or take, depending on how far the syrup is reduced.
Preserving melons occupied a particular place in the American farm kitchen: hard, bland, nearly inedible fresh, they were grown to be turned into something else, and their firm flesh took sugar and lemon without collapsing the way a peach would. The name is usually explained by the finished slices' resemblance to the candied citron peel imported for cakes, and they were sometimes used the same way, in fruitcake and mincemeat, as a cheaper domestic substitute. Buckeye Cookery (1877) credited many of its recipes to named contributors, and the attribution to Mrs. J. H. Robinson of Kenton reflects that method: preserving knowledge circulated as personal property, credited by name.