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Preserves (Previously prepared as follows)
previously prepared as follows: Bruise and tie in a muslin bag four ounces of ginger-root, and boil in two or three pints of water until it is strongly flavored. At the same time boil in a little water until tender, in another pan, three or four sliced lemons; make a syrup of the sugar and the water in which the lemons and the ginger-root were boiled, add the rinds and slices of lemon to this and boil slowly half to three-quarters of an hour. Citrons may be prepared in the same way, by paring, coring and slicing, or cutting into fanciful shapes with tin cutters made for the purpose.
This is the tail end of a longer preserve entry — the fruit it belongs to was named in the lines above, and what survives here is the ginger-and-lemon syrup that finishes it. Read it as a method for a spiced preserving syrup rather than a standalone recipe.
- The missing quantitiesNo weight of sugar or fruit is given; the preceding paragraph would have supplied them. Nineteenth-century preserves ran roughly pound for pound, sugar to prepared fruit, which is what makes them keep. Treat any figure you supply as your own decision, not the book's.
- Ginger root, four ouncesWhole root, not ground. In a book of this date this may well mean dried whole (race) ginger rather than fresh green root; either can be used, with the dried giving a sharper, more medicinal heat. Bruising it — smashing it flat with the side of a knife or a mallet — opens the fibres so the water pulls out flavour.
- The muslin bagA square of cheesecloth tied with kitchen string does the job. It keeps fibrous shards out of the finished syrup, which matters more here than it would in a soup.
- Two or three pintsAbout 4 to 6 cups. Expect it to reduce considerably during the long simmer; the instruction is to boil "until strongly flavored," so taste rather than clock-watch.
- CitronIn an American book of this date, citron usually means the citron melon (a hard, pale-fleshed relative of the watermelon grown specifically for preserving), not the Mediterranean citrus fruit. Either can be used, but the melon needs the paring and coring described here and holds its shape through long boiling; citrus peel does not need coring.
- The boiling timeHalf to three-quarters of an hour of slow boiling thickens the syrup and softens the lemon slices in it. Rushing it at a hard boil scorches the sugar before the fruit has absorbed any.
- Lemon rindsBoiling the sliced lemons separately first tenderises the pith. Note that the recipe then uses that cooking water in the syrup. Do not skip the pre-boil and add raw slices to the syrup — the rind will stay leathery.
- StorageThe recipe gives no sealing or processing instructions, as many of this period do not. Ladle into clean jars, cool, and keep refrigerated; use a current tested method if you want shelf-stable jars.
Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled from Ohio housekeepers, devotes many pages to preserves because a household that did not put up fruit in autumn had none in February. Ginger and lemon appear together constantly in this section: both were imports available even inland by rail, and both do useful work in a preserve d pectin that help a set, the ginger masks the flatness of fruit boiled for an hour in sugar. Citron melon, mentioned at the end, was grown across the Midwest largely for preserving, though also as stock feed; it has little flavour of its own and takes on whatever syrup it is cooked in, which is why the recipe casually suggests cutting it into "fanciful shapes with tin cutters made for the purpose." Those cutters were sold for exactly this, and the resulting stars and diamonds of translucent preserved melon are said to have turned up in the fruit cake and mincemeat that closed a Victorian winter table.