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Pumpkin, Preserved
Take a fresh pumpkin, pare it, halve it, and pick out the seeds, then cut it into thin slices about the size of the palm of one's hand. Weigh these slices, and allow a pound of powdered sugar, the juice of two large lemons, the peel of one, and half a tea-spoonful of ground ginger, to each pound of pumpkin. Lay the slices in layers upon a large dish, sprinkle the sugar between the layers, strain the lemon-juice over the whole, and leave it for two or three days. At the end of that time, turn the whole into a preserving-pan with the lemon-rind thinly sliced over, and allow a breakfast-cupful of water for every three pounds of sugar used. Boil the mixture gently until the slices are tender, turn them into a bowl, and let them remain covered for six or eight days. Throw away the bag containing the ginger. Strain off the syrup, and boil it again until it is thick; pour it at once over the pumpkin. Put the slices of pumpkin into jars, and cover these with paper dipped in the white of an egg. Store in a cool dry place. Time, twelve days. Probable cost, uncertain.
A twelve-day sugar preserve rather than a jam: the pumpkin is drawn with sugar, simmered, rested, and then re-syruped so the slices stay translucent and firm. Most of the work is waiting.
- The missing ginger bagThe method says to throw away "the bag containing the ginger" but never tells you to make one. Tie the half-teaspoon of ground ginger per pound into a scrap of muslin before it goes into the pan, or it will cloud the syrup and settle grittily on the slices.
- Which pumpkinUse a dense, dry-fleshed cooking squash — a small sugar pumpkin, kabocha or crown prince. A large field pumpkin of the jack-o'-lantern sort is watery and stringy, and the slices will collapse rather than candy.
- Breakfast-cupfulA generous cup, roughly 8-10 fl oz (250-300 ml). One of these for every three pounds of sugar used, so a 3 lb batch of pumpkin needs about a cup of water.
- Preserving-panA wide, heavy pan with a large surface area, not a tall stockpot. Width matters more than depth: the syrup has to reduce quickly at the end without the slices stewing to mush.
- Powdered sugarIn Victorian usage this is finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Use ordinary granulated or caster sugar.
- "Boil gently until tender"Twenty to forty minutes depending on the squash. Stop while the slices still hold their shape and have gone glassy at the edges; they continue to soften during the long rest in syrup.
- The final boilReduce the strained syrup to about 220-222F (104-106C), around jam-setting point, then pour it boiling over the drained slices. Take it much further and it will crystallise in the jar.
- Egg-white paper, and what to do insteadPaper brushed with egg white shrinks tight as it dries and was the standard Victorian jar seal. It excludes dust, not microbes. Pack into sterilised jars with proper lids and keep the jars in the refrigerator; do not treat this as a shelf-stable water-bath preserve, since pumpkin is a low-acid vegetable and the recipe gives no processing time.
- Yield and useUse -- Serve the slices with cold ham or hard cheese, on buttered bread, or chopped into cakes and puddings in place of candied peel.
Pumpkin preserved in sugar with lemon and ginger was one way of dealing with a glut of garden squash in nineteenth-century Britain and America, where it went by the name "pumpkin chips" atranslucent and faintly resinous when the slices emerge from the syrup, and sometimes likened to candied ginger. Cucurbits took sugar well and cost almost nothing, which may explain the entry's unusual sign-off: "probable cost, uncertain" suggests that pumpkins were grown rather than bought and had no reliable market price. The technique itself is much older than the book and much wider than England, belonging to the same family as Iberian cabello de ángel and the candied gourd preserves of the eastern Mediterranean, all of which rest on the same principle: an equal weight of sugar drawn slowly into bland, firm flesh over days, with acid from citrus to keep the syrup from graining and to give the finished sweet some edge.