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Melon Glace
Prepare a syrup as follows. Dissolve three pounds of loaf sugar in a quart of water; whisk in part of the white of an egg, then set it to boil gently for five minutes. Add a little cold water at two different times, and strain through a fine muslin into an enamelled stewpan. Flavour with essence of vanilla. Cut a melon lengthwise in good slices, removing the rind and seeds, put them into the above syrup while hot, and let them be covered up until next day, when boil the syrup, and pour it hot over the fruit; do this on three successive days. Lastly, put the fruit into jars, and pour the hot syrup over. When cold cover with bladder, and keep in a cool place.
This is a classic candying method — successive days of hot syrup driving sugar into the fruit as water is drawn out — but the finishing and storage instructions belong to a period before anyone measured what makes a preserve keep. The technique is sound; the sealing is not.
- Why the storage failsMelon is a low-acid fruit. The jars here are filled hot, tied over with bladder and set in a larder — there is no processing step, no measured sugar concentration in the finished syrup, and no acidification. A bladder cover is not a hermetic seal, so this is not the classic sealed-jar case, but an unprocessed, unmeasured low-acid preserve held at cellar temperature is outside any modern tested method, and spoilage — including growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is undetectable by smell or appearance — cannot be ruled out.
- The sugar is unmeasurable hereCandied fruit is safe when the syrup is concentrated far enough that water activity drops below the level at which microbes grow, which candy makers check by density or boiling point. This recipe gives an initial 3 lb sugar to 1 quart water and then boils the syrup an unspecified amount on three separate days. The final concentration could be anywhere. Use a current tested recipe for candied or glacé melon if you want to make this.
- Bladder as a closurePig or ox bladder, soaked and tied wet over the jar mouth, shrinks as it dries and pulls tight. It excludes dust and slows evaporation but it is not an airtight, sterile seal. It was one of several common covers of the period, along with waxed or brandied paper and sealing wax, before the screw-band jar became widespread.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone, broken up with nippers. It was the most refined grade available and prized for clear syrups; ordinary granulated white sugar is its equivalent.
- The egg whiteWhisking in part of an egg white and adding cold water twice is clarification: the albumen coagulates as the syrup heats and carries scum and impurities to the surface, where straining through muslin removes them. Modern refined sugar dissolves clean and needs none of this.
- Enamelled stewpanA nonreactive surface, wanted because iron and untinned copper could react with fruit and syrup. Any nonreactive pan does the same job.
- Essence of vanillaA concentrated alcoholic extract. The original gives no quantity, as period recipes commonly left flavourings to the cook's judgement.
Preserving fruit by repeated steeping in ever-hotter, ever-heavier syrup is one of the oldest confectioner's techniques in the European kitchen, inherited from Arab and then Italian sugar work and thoroughly domesticated in Britain by the eighteenth century. The point of the three-day repetition is osmotic: plunge fruit straight into a heavy syrup and it collapses, but replace its water gradually over several immersions and the flesh stays firm and turns translucent. Melon was a favourite candidate because it holds shape well and carries added flavour — vanilla here, though citron melon and preserved melon flavoured with ginger or lemon were equally common. Cassell's places the recipe among its preserving instructions.