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Guava Sweet Pickle
Make a syrup of three pounds of sugar to each quart of vinegar and six pounds of fruit, adding a teaspoon each of allspice, mace, cloves, and cinnamon. Simmer half an hour, skimming the while, then drop into it the whole fruit, peeled (ripe but very firm), and cook slowly until tender but not too soft. Remove fruit and cook syrup alone till thick, then pour, boiling hot, over the fruit, packed in jars for sealing.
A classic sweet-pickle syrup — sugar, vinegar, four spices — applied to whole guavas. The proportions are sound; the sealing method is the part that has not aged well.
- The hinge: firmnessGuavas soften abruptly. Choose fruit that is fragrant and just yielding at the stem end but still hard to the thumb, and pull it from the syrup the moment a skewer slides in with slight resistance. Fruit cooked to true tenderness in the syrup will collapse when the boiling syrup is poured back over it.
- Scale and yieldSix pounds of fruit, three pounds of sugar and a quart of vinegar is a large batch — roughly six to seven pint jars. Halving or quartering it works without adjustment.
- Vinegar strengthUse a standard 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and modern specialty vinegars sold at 4 percent will leave the pickle less acidic than the recipe assumes.
- SpicesA teaspoon each of ground allspice, mace, cloves and cinnamon will cloud the syrup badly. Use whole allspice berries, cloves, blades of mace and cinnamon sticks tied in a cloth bag — about a tablespoon of each whole spice — and lift the bag out before the final reduction.
- SkimmingThe half-hour of skimming is not busywork. The sugar-and-vinegar syrup throws up a scum of impurities and fine debris as it simmers; removing it is what gives the finished syrup its clarity.
- Peeling and seedsGuava skin is thin and comes away with a swivel peeler. The seedy central pulp is left in place here, which is traditional but gritty to some palates; halving the fruit and scooping the seed mass out gives a smoother pickle at the cost of the whole-fruit presentation.
- "Cook syrup alone till thick"Reduce until it sheets from a spoon, around 220°F on a thermometer. Much past that and it will be stiff and candy-like in the jar once cold.
- SealingPouring boiling syrup over packed fruit and sealing — open-kettle canning — was standard practice and is no longer considered reliable, since the jar contents never reach a controlled temperature and the seal often fails silently. Either refrigerate the finished jars and eat them within a few weeks, or follow a current tested boiling-water-bath process for pickled fruit.
The guava, Psidium guajava, is native to tropical America and was carried by Spanish and Portuguese ships to Asia and Africa early enough that many places now treat it as their own. In late nineteenth-century American cookbooks it appears mainly in connection with Florida and Cuba, usually as jelly or the stiff paste sold as guava cheese; a whole-fruit sweet pickle like this one is the same treatment given to peaches, pears and crabapples in the household preserving books of the period, transplanted to a tropical fruit. Sweet pickles of this kind — heavy syrup, sharp vinegar, allspice, mace, cloves and cinnamon — were generally served with cold meats rather than as a dessert, and the sugar and acid together did the preserving work in an era before reliable processing times were published.