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Watermelon Pickle
Pare off very carefully the green part of the rind of a good, ripe watermelon, trim off the red core, cut in pieces one or two inches in length, place in a porcelain-lined kettle, in the proportion of one gallon rinds to two heaping tea-spoons common salt and water to nearly cover, boil until tender enough to pierce with a silver fork, pour into a colander to drain, and dry by taking a few pieces at a time in the hand, and pressing gently with a crash towel. Make syrup, and treat rinds exactly as directed for pickled peaches. Continue adding rinds, as melons are used at table, preparing them: first by cooking in salt water as above; when as many are prepared as are wanted, and they are nearly pickled, drain and finish as directed in peach pickles, except when the syrup is boiled the last time, put in melons and boil fifteen minutes; set jar near stove, skim out melons and put in jar a few at a time, heating gradually so as not to break it, then pour in syrup boiling hot. A rind nearly an inch thick, crisp and tender, is best, although any may be used.. If scum rises, and the syrup assumes a whitish appearance, drain, boil and skim syrup, add melons, and boil until syrup is like thin molasses.
A thrift preserve built on top of another recipe in the same chapter, so read the peach pickle entry first. The instructions assume you will be eating watermelon over several weeks and adding rind to the same syrup as you go.
- It depends on another recipeThe syrup, the spicing and the repeated pour-over are all borrowed from the book's pickled peaches, which means a sweetened spiced vinegar syrup, drained and reboiled over the fruit on successive days. The quantities here are genuinely incomplete without that page.
- Porcelain-lined kettleEnameled cast iron or stainless steel. Vinegar will attack bare copper and can pit aluminum, which is presumably why the original calls for a lined kettle and a silver fork rather than iron or steel for testing.
- Crash towelCrash is a coarse, loosely woven linen. A plain flour-sack towel does the same job; the point is to blot the rind dry so it does not thin the syrup.
- The salt is not a cureTwo heaping teaspoons to a gallon of rind is a very light brine, there only to season and firm the flesh during the first boil. Do not treat it as a preserving step.
- Rind thicknessThe recipe wants rind nearly an inch thick, though it allows that any may be used. Many melons sold now, especially small seedless ones, tend to have thinner rinds, so a large field melon or an heirloom variety will generally give better pieces.
- Do not overcook the first boilBoil in the salted water only until a fork just pierces the rind. Rind boiled to softness before it ever meets the syrup collapses into mush during the fifteen-minute final boil.
- "Like thin molasses"That is the finished-syrup cue: thick enough to coat a spoon but still pourable. The book gives no thermometer reading. The whitish scum the recipe warns about suggests a syrup too dilute to keep, which is why it directs you to drain, reboil and skim.
- Sealing and storageFilling a warmed jar and topping it with boiling syrup was common practice in the 1870s and is no longer considered sufficient on its own. Refrigerate the finished jars and use them within a few weeks, or follow a current tested water-bath process for sweet pickles.
Watermelon rind pickle is a monument to nineteenth-century household thrift: the part of the fruit nobody could eat was salted, boiled and candied in spiced vinegar syrup, and it turns up in American cookbooks throughout the 1800s alongside pickled citron melon, which was grown specifically for its firm flesh. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877 from contributions by local women, treats it as a running project rather than a single afternoon's work; the direction to keep adding rind "as melons are used at table" assumes a household eating melon steadily through late summer and unwilling to waste any of it. The sweet-pickle technique itself, with repeated draining and reboiling of the syrup over several days, works by slowly raising the sugar concentration in the fruit rather than shocking it, which is what keeps the rind translucent instead of shriveled.