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Melon, Pickled
Take melons about the size of a large orange, and before they are quite ripe. When peeled, and the seeds are taken out, slice them into a bowl of good vinegar, and cover up for a week or more. At the end of that time drain the fruit, and simmer it until tender in an enamelled pan with fresh vinegar. Again drain the slices, and when dry make a thin syrup by boiling together a pound of sugar with a pint and a half of water. Skim well, put the melons into the bottles in which they are to remain, and cover with the syrup. In eight or ten days throw off half of it, and fill the bottles with boiled vinegar in which the flavour of a few cloves has been extracted. Let it be quite cold before being added.
This is a shelf-stable sweet pickle put up without any measured acidity or heat processing, and it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain where the method fails rather than how to repair it.
- The acid is diluted, not maintainedThe melon is drained of vinegar twice and then covered with a syrup of one pound of sugar to a pint and a half of water — a liquid with essentially no acid in it. Half of that is later replaced with clove vinegar, which leaves the finished brine at an unknown and probably insufficient acidity for room-temperature keeping.
- Melon is a low-acid fruitRipe melon sits around pH 6, close to neutral, and underripe melon is not much better. Low-acid produce sealed in bottles and held at room temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which often gives no smell, gas or off flavour to warn you.
- No vinegar strength is stated"Good vinegar" tells you nothing measurable, and household vinegars of the period varied considerably in strength. Modern tested pickles specify 5 per cent acetic acid and a fixed vinegar-to-water ratio for exactly this reason.
- No processing, no sterilised jarsThe fruit is simmered in vinegar at one stage, but it is then drained and dried in the open before bottling, the bottles are simply filled, and nothing is heat-processed once sealed. The clove vinegar is expressly added cold, and the eight-to-ten-day open-and-refill stage reintroduces contamination.
- A week uncovered in vinegar at room temperatureA week or more in vinegar at room temperature -- The recipe says only to cover the bowl and leave the slices for a week or more; no temperature is given. In a modern kitchen at 20eC C or warmer this is a week of unrefrigerated fruit sitting in a liquid of unknown strength.
- Terms, for reading the recipeA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz. An "enamelled pan" means enamel over iron, specified because bare iron, copper or brass reacts with vinegar and taints the fruit — non-reactive pans are still the right choice for any pickling.
- If you want pickled melonUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you a measured vinegar ratio and a processing time.
Melon pickle belongs to the large Victorian family of sweet-sour fruit pickles — walnuts, damsons, peaches, nasturtium pods — that were eaten with cold meat, ham and curries, and that Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery catalogues alongside its chutneys and ketchups. Underripe or surplus melons were natural candidates: firm enough to hold their shape through repeated draining and simmering, and bland enough to take on whatever the spice jar offered, which here is a modest few cloves. In Britain melons were largely grown under glass, in the frames and hothouses of larger gardens, so a recipe specifying melons "about the size of a large orange" and "before they are quite ripe" reads as a use for small or surplus fruit. The same idea crossed the Atlantic, where hollowed muskmelons stuffed with spices and pickled were widely known as "mangoes" — a name generally traced to the imported Indian pickle they were meant to imitate. A long cold steep in vinegar followed by a sugar syrup is a pattern that recurs in nineteenth-century fruit pickles, at a time when the keeping power of vinegar and sugar was understood by result rather than by measurement.