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Sweet Pickled Casaba Melon
The melons should not be too ripe; cut in sections, remove outer rind, and the inner soft portion with seeds. Cut the sections in small pieces of as nearly uniform shape as possible; cover with salted water, and let stand over night. Drain, rinse in cold water, and drain again. Weigh the melon. Set the pieces of melon over the fire in boiling water and let cook until tender. Make a syrup of sugar equal to half the weight of the melon, a cup of vinegar, and two cups of water for each three pounds of sugar. Press two cloves into each piece of melon, and for three pounds of melon add three long sticks of cinnamon. Cook the melon in the syrup until transparent; skim into jars, return all of the syrup to the fire to reduce until quite thick, then pour over the melon in the jars, fill the jars to overflow, and at once adjust sterilized covers.
This is an open-kettle sweet pickle: hot fruit and hot syrup ladled into jars and capped, with no processing after sealing. The technique was standard in 1914 and is no longer considered safe for a product of this composition, so the notes below explain the problem rather than adapting the method.
- Why it fails: acidityMelon flesh is a low-acid food, pH roughly 6. The syrup here carries one cup of vinegar against two cups of water and three pounds of sugar, and that syrup is then further diluted by the water in the cooked melon. Nothing in the recipe fixes the finished pH at or below 4.6, which is the line below which Clostridium botulinum cannot produce toxin.
- Why it fails: no heat processSkimming hot melon into jars and capping them does not sterilize the contents; the jar interior never reliably reaches or holds a lethal temperature. A sealed, low-acid, anaerobic jar held at room temperature is precisely the condition botulinum spores need. Sweet pickles of this kind are now given a measured boiling-water process, and the tested proportions of vinegar to fruit come with it. Use a current tested recipe.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereSugar equal to half the weight of the melon sounds heavy, but once the pieces are saturated with syrup the water activity in the fruit stays well above the level that would inhibit bacterial growth. Jam-strength sugar concentrations are much higher, and jams also rely on fruit acid.
- Casaba melonA winter melon with a wrinkled yellow rind and pale, mild flesh, still sold in late summer and autumn. Unlike watermelon-rind pickle, this recipe uses the firm flesh rather than the rind, which is presumably behind the instruction that the melons should not be too ripe.
- Unmeasured brine"Salted water" is given no strength and the overnight soak no temperature. Brine strengths in period recipes varied widely; the step appears to be there to firm the flesh by drawing out water rather than to preserve it.
- "Sterilized covers"In 1914 this meant boiled glass lids with rubber rings, or tin caps, on a jar sealed while hot. Modern two-piece lids are designed to seal during and after a heat process, not to be relied on as the sole safeguard.
- Spoilage signsIf jars of this sort turn up in a cupboard, a bulging lid, a hissing release, cloudy syrup or an off smell all mean discard. Botulinum toxin, however, produces no reliable sensory warning, which is the whole reason the process matters.
Sweet spiced pickles of melon, cucumber and watermelon rind were a fixture of American preserving from the mid-nineteenth century onward: they used up a bulky, cheap, mild-flavoured crop and turned it into something to eat alongside cold meat through the winter, with cloves and stick cinnamon doing most of the flavouring work. The casaba is generally traced to Turkey, its name usually linked to the town of Kasaba, and it is said to have been grown in California from the 1880s, reaching commercial scale around the turn of the century. The whole method here belongs to the open-kettle era, before home canning guidance was reorganised around measured acidity and timed processing; a book like this one sits right on the hinge, giving careful weights for sugar and fruit while still assuming that hot syrup and a boiled lid were enough.