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Spiced Nutmeg Melon
Select melons not quite ripe, open, scrape out the pulp, peel, and slice; put the fruit in a stone jar, and, for five pounds fruit, take a quart vinegar, and two and a half pounds sugar; scald vinegar and sugar together, and pour over the fruit; scald the syrup and pour over the fruit each day for eight successive days. On the ninth, add one ounce stick-cinnamon, one of whole cloves, and one of all spice. Scald fruit, vinegar and spices together, and seal up in jars. This pickle should stand two or three months before using. Blue plums are delicious prepared in this way. -Mrs. Gen. Noyes.
A nine-day sweet pickle of the kind that filled Midwestern cellars every September. The repetition is the method: draining, reheating and re-pouring the syrup each day pulls water out of the melon and drives sugar and acid in, so the slices firm up instead of collapsing.
- What a nutmeg melon isAn older name for the small, netted muskmelon, close to what a supermarket sells as cantaloupe, though period nutmeg melons were often green-fleshed rather than orange. Choose one that is still hard and barely scented, as the recipe directs; a ripe melon risks collapsing over the days of scalding.
- Weights and volumesFive pounds of prepared fruit is roughly two large melons after peeling and seeding. A quart of vinegar is 4 cups; two and a half pounds of sugar is about 5 2/3 cups. Yield depends on how far the fruit shrinks over the nine days — expect several pints.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely in acidity. Use a standard 5 percent vinegar, cider or white, and do not dilute it — the melon itself is low in acid and will thin the syrup considerably as it gives up juice.
- The stone jarA glazed crock or any non-reactive vessel — glass, stainless, food-grade plastic. Not aluminum, copper or bare cast iron, which the vinegar will attack over eight days.
- The daily scaldPour the syrup off the fruit, bring it to a boil in a saucepan, and pour it back hot. The fruit itself is not cooked until the ninth day. Keep the crock covered and cool between scaldings.
- SpicesAn ounce each of stick cinnamon, whole cloves and allspice is generous, though the volumes differ sharply by spice: an ounce of whole cloves or allspice berries is roughly a quarter-cup, while an ounce of cinnamon is only three or four sticks. Tie them in muslin so the finished pickle stays clear and the spices can be lifted out.
- Sealing and storage"Seal up in jars" means open-kettle sealing, which modern practice has abandoned — hot syrup poured into a jar does not reliably sterilize the headspace or the lid. Treat this as a refrigerator pickle, or follow a current tested recipe if you want shelf-stable jars.
- The waitingTwo or three months is not padding. The syrup is very sweet at first and needs time for the acid and spice to move through the fruit and balance it.
- Blue plumsDamsons or Italian prune plums. Leave them whole and prick each one two or three times with a needle, or the skins split and the flesh slides off during the daily scaldings.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) devotes a full section to sweet pickles because a farm household in late summer faced more melons, plums and cucumbers than it could eat fresh, and vinegar plus sugar was the cheapest preservative in the pantry. "Nutmeg melon" was the common nineteenth-century American name for the netted muskmelon, said to come from the resemblance of its furrowed, russet-netted rind to a nutmeg. The eight- or nine-day scald is a genuinely old technique, and it survives in the "nine-day" and "fourteen-day" sweet pickles still passed around in family recipe collections. Like most of this book, the recipe carries a contributor's name: Buckeye Cookery was compiled from the household knowledge of a network of Ohio women, and "Mrs. Gen. Noyes" is credited in the wifely-of-rank style of the day rather than by her own given name.