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Persimmon Preserves
Take cultivated persimmons which are ripe, yet firm. Allow an equal weight of sugar. The fruit must lie in water for twelve hours. Stew the fruit in water to cover until tender; drain and spread out to become cool and firm. Add a cup of cold water to every pound of sugar.
Boil and skim until clear, then cook the fruit in it about ten minutes. Spread on dishes in the sun. To the syrup put the juice and peel of two lemons for four quarts. Boil until thick.
Return the fruit for twenty minutes. Store in cans.
A candied-style preserve in the old manner: the fruit is cooked, dried, and returned to a thickening syrup in stages so it stays whole rather than collapsing into jam. The staged cooking is the whole point, and shortening it gives mush.
- Which persimmon"Cultivated" here most likely means the Asian persimmon (Diospyros kaki) — Fuyu, Hachiya, Tanenashi — as against the small wild American persimmon, though the recipe names no variety. Choose fruit fully coloured but still firm to the thumb; soft-ripe Hachiyas will disintegrate in the first stewing.
- The twelve-hour soakThe recipe does not say what the soak is for; it was presumably meant to draw out some tannin and firm the flesh, though cold water is a slow way to reduce astringency. Peel and remove the calyx and any seeds before soaking.
- Equal weight of sugarWeigh the prepared fruit and match it in sugar — 2 lb fruit to 2 lb sugar (about 4½ cups granulated). This is a weight-for-weight preserve, not a volume measure, and the ratio is what makes it keep.
- The syrupA cup of cold water per pound of sugar gives roughly a 2:1 syrup by weight. Boil and skim until the froth stops rising and the liquid is clear before the fruit goes in.
- "Four quarts"The lemon direction is keyed to four quarts of syrup, not of fruit, and the original never says how much syrup you will have. Scale it as the juice and grated zest of one lemon per two quarts of syrup and taste; the acid is doing real work here, since persimmon is a low-acid fruit.
- Spreading in the sunThis drying rest lets the fruit firm before the final boil. Sun-drying on open dishes is not a step to reproduce as written — use a rack in an oven at its lowest setting, door ajar, for an hour, or a dehydrator at 135F, until the surfaces are tacky rather than wet.
- "Boil until thick"Take the syrup to about 220F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful sheets off the edge. Overshoot and the twenty-minute return of the fruit will crystallise it.
- Storing"Store in cans" means glass jars sealed hot. Pack fruit and boiling syrup into sterilised half-pint or pint jars leaving ¼ inch headspace, then process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes (longer above 1,000 ft). Refrigerate anything that does not seal.
- YieldYield depends on how much of the syrup goes into the jars with the fruit; two pounds of prepared persimmon with its sugar fills several half-pint jars.
Persimmon preserves belong to the long American habit of candying whole fruit in successive syrups — the same method applied to figs, watermelon rind and citron — where the fruit is cooked, rested, and cooked again so the sugar penetrates without the flesh breaking down. The distinction the recipe draws between "cultivated" and wild persimmons dates it: Asian kaki persimmons were introduced to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and were widely planted in the South and California, and by the time of the home-canning manuals they were common enough to be assumed. The native American persimmon, traditionally said to be astringent until frost-touched and full of seeds, went into puddings and beer rather than preserves. The twelve-hour water soak and the sun-drying interval are both pre-refrigeration techniques, aimed at tannin and at driving off moisture that would otherwise dilute the syrup and invite fermentation in the jar.