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Watermelon Preserves
Pare off outside green rind, cut in pieces two inches long, weigh, throw into cold water, skim out, add a heaping tea-spoon each of salt and pulverized alum to two gallons of rinds, let stand until salt and alum dissolve, fill the kettle with cold water, and place on top of stove where it will slowly come to boiling point, covering with a large plate so as to keep rinds under; boil until they can be easily pierced with a fork, drain them from the water, and put into a syrup 1
A standard nineteenth-century treatment of watermelon rind: brine-and-alum soak, blanch, then candy in syrup. The text here breaks off mid-sentence at the syrup, so the sugar quantity is lost — the usual Buckeye-era proportion for preserves is a pound of sugar to a pound of prepared fruit, but that is inference, not what the page says.
- Use the white part onlyThe recipe specifies paring off the outside green rind; in practice the pink flesh is trimmed too, since only the firm white rind candies properly. A thick-rinded melon gives more usable material than many melons sold today.
- The alumPowdered alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) was the standard crisping agent and is still sold in the spice aisle for pickling, though many cooks now leave it out or substitute a calcium-chloride firming salt. The quantity here is small -- a heaping teaspoon to two gallons of rind -- and it is discarded with the cooking water when the rinds are drained.
- Two gallons of rindsVolume, not weight. The instruction to weigh the cut rind first is for the syrup that follows, since preserve syrups were reckoned against the fruit's weight; the page breaks off before the proportion is given.
- Keep the pieces submergedThe plate on top is the hinge of the whole first stage. Rind floats, and any piece that bobs above the water blanches unevenly and stays tough in the finished preserve.
- Bring it up slowly"Place on top of stove where it will slowly come to boiling point" suggests a cooler part of the range top. On a modern hob, medium-low for roughly 25 to 40 minutes, until a fork goes through with no resistance at the centre.
- The missing syrupThe page is cut off, so no sugar weight, water quantity or cooking time for the syrup stage survives here. Preserves of this type were simmered until the syrup threaded and the rind turned translucent, often with lemon and ginger; consult a complete recipe for the proportions.
- StorageThe text breaks off before any jarring or sealing instruction. For jars intended to sit on a shelf, follow a current water-bath canning procedure; otherwise refrigerate and eat within a few weeks.
Watermelon-rind preserve is thrift made ornamental: the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the pig turned into a translucent, faintly spiced sweetmeat for the tea table. Sugar preserving was one of the few reliable ways a nineteenth-century household could hold summer fruit through winter, and the rind's dense, pectin-poor flesh took a syrup better than most, holding its shape instead of collapsing. The alum and salt soak belongs to an older school of preserving in which chemical firming agents were routine in pickles and sweetmeats alike; alum appears throughout Buckeye Cookery (1877) and its contemporaries, and only fell out of general use in the twentieth century, largely because it was found unnecessary and can cause digestive upset in quantity. The dish is most strongly associated with the American South, where it remains a fixture, but as this Ohio compilation shows it was common wherever melons grew and sugar was affordable.