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Citron or Pie-Melon Sauce
Cut and pare the melon; place in double boiler with no water or barely sufficient to wet the bottom layer of pieces, and cook till soft. Add sugar and lemon juice or other flavouring. This approaches apple sauce in flavour and consistency. To vary the flavour add, instead of lemon, or with it, barberry, cranberry, currant, or raspberry syrup, when the melon begins to soften.
A minimal recipe that assumes you know what a citron melon is and how sweet you like things. Both need filling in.
- What a pie-melon isThe citron or pie-melon is a hard-fleshed relative of the watermelon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides), grown for preserving rather than eating raw. Its flesh is white, firm, nearly flavourless and holds its shape under long cooking, which is why it behaves like apple here. It turns up at farm stands and in seed catalogues as citron melon or preserving melon; unripe or thick-fleshed cooking pumpkin and chayote are the closest common stand-ins.
- Pare thoroughlyCut away the rind and every trace of the green underlayer, and scrape out the seeds and the soft seed cavity. The green zone stays tough and bitter no matter how long you cook it.
- The double boiler is the pointThe double boiler keeps the melon off direct heat, where it would scorch, and lets it break down gently in whatever moisture it gives up; the recipe allows only enough water to wet the bottom layer of pieces, if that. Timing will vary a good deal with the size and ripeness of the pieces; cut them to an inch or smaller to speed things along.
- Sugar and acid, unmeasuredNo quantities are given because the melon has almost no flavour of its own. Start around 1/2 cup sugar and the juice of one lemon per pound of prepared flesh, then taste. Without the acid the sauce is flat and cloying, so do not skip the lemon.
- Add sugar lateSugar added at the start tends to firm the flesh and slow its softening, so cook the melon until it collapses and sweeten afterwards, which is the order the recipe gives. Whether the same reasoning lies behind adding the fruit syrups 'when the melon begins to soften' is a guess.
- The fruit syrupsBarberry, cranberry, currant and raspberry are all sharply acid, and cranberry and currant are relatively rich in pectin in the fruit, though a strained sweetened syrup carries much less of it — expect colour and flavour more than added body. A half cup per pound of melon is a reasonable starting point. Bottled cranberry or blackcurrant syrup works; so does a few tablespoons of the corresponding jelly stirred in off the heat.
- TextureThe result is looser than apple sauce unless you cook it down. If it stays watery, finish it uncovered in an open pan over low heat, stirring, until it mounds on a spoon.
- Yield and keepingA 3 lb melon yields roughly 2 lb of pared flesh and about a pint and a half of sauce. Treat it as a fresh sauce: refrigerate and use within a week, or freeze. The recipe gives no processing instructions, so do not attempt to can it.
The citron melon was a staple of nineteenth-century kitchen gardens, and its blandness was part of the appeal. Its firm flesh absorbed whatever sugar, acid and spice it was given, so it was made into mock citron peel for fruitcake, into preserves cut in cubes and simmered with lemon and ginger, and into pickles and sweetmeats that kept through the winter. The name "pie-melon" is often said to record its other use, as a filling that could stand in for apple when apples were scarce or spent, though that gloss is traditional rather than established. This recipe belongs to a genre of cookery writing that promoted using up garden gluts, and the comparison to apple sauce is doing the selling: the author is telling a reader who has a heap of unpromising melons on the porch that they can be turned into something familiar. The list of alternative syrups, all sharp northern-garden fruits, points to the same household economy of preserved bottles waiting in the cellar.