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Marmalade and Jelly
The marmalade (from the dark, non-astringent fruit) should be cooked in double-boiler with no water. Add instead, a little orange juice (about half a pint to two quarts of pulp), and when cooked down thick stir in three-fourths the quantity of sugar (heated) that there is pulp, and cook till stiff as one's taste indicates. Jelly may also be made with orange juice and orange-pulp added, or the pulp of pie-melon, half melon and half persimmon; but, while the jelly is pretty and delicate it has not much individuality and can scarcely be said to pay for the trouble. The persimmon makes excellent vinegar, beer, and wine and may be preserved, dried, somewhat after the manner of figs.
This is a persimmon marmalade, written in the compressed style of a book that assumed you already knew how to boil down fruit. The heading on the page belongs to a neighbouring entry; the text itself is entirely about persimmons, with melon as a stretcher.
- "Dark, non-astringent fruit" is the whole recipeAmerican persimmons are loaded with tannin until they are so soft the skins wrinkle and the flesh is nearly liquid. Anything short of that will pucker the mouth and no amount of sugar will fix it. The author may mean a particular dark-fleshed sort as much as a stage of ripeness, but in practice frost or several days of ripening indoors is what brings fruit to that state.
- Getting the pulpPress the ripe fruit through a sieve or food mill to leave behind skins, calyxes and the large seeds. Two quarts of pulp is roughly 4 lb of sieved fruit, which takes something in the region of 6-7 lb of whole persimmons.
- Why a double boilerPersimmon pulp is thick, sugary and scorches on direct heat almost immediately, and burnt persimmon tastes of nothing else. The double boiler is slow but it is the reason the recipe works; if you use a heavy pan directly on the burner, keep it low and stir constantly.
- The orange juiceHalf a pint to two quarts of pulp is about 1 cup juice to 8 cups pulp. In the recipe it stands in for water as the only added liquid; persimmon is low in acid, so the juice probably also helps the flavour and the set rather than being there for flavour alone.
- Sugar by volume, and warmed"Three-fourths the quantity of sugar that there is pulp" reads as a volume ratio: 6 cups sugar to 8 cups pulp. Warming the sugar before adding it was often recommended in period cookery to keep the boil from stalling; it is optional with a modern burner but harmless.
- "Stiff as one's taste indicates"Persimmon marmalade will not sheet off a spoon like a pectin jelly. Judge it by dragging a spoon across the bottom of the pan: when the track stays open for a moment, stop. It thickens noticeably as it cools.
- Pie-melonThe citron or preserving melon, a hard white-fleshed melon grown specifically for preserves. It has no flavour of its own, which is exactly the author's complaint about the jelly version. Skip it.
- StorageNo sealing or processing is described here, so treat the result as a refrigerator preserve: cool, cover, keep chilled, and use within a few weeks. For shelf-stable jars, follow current water-bath canning directions for a tested persimmon preserve.
- YieldTwo quarts of pulp with 6 cups of sugar cooks down to roughly 4-5 pints.
The fruit here is almost certainly Diospyros virginiana, the American persimmon, which grew wild across the eastern and southern United States and was gathered rather than bought. Its reputation was built on tannin: unripe fruit is famously astringent, and the folk rule that persimmons need a frost before they are fit to eat reflects the fact that the tannins only break down at full, collapsing ripeness. Because the fruit fell all at once and would not keep, households turned it into whatever would -- hence the author's offhand list of persimmon vinegar, beer and wine, and drying "somewhat after the manner of figs." Persimmon beer, made by fermenting the mashed fruit with cornmeal or bran, is widely documented in nineteenth-century Southern accounts. The candid verdict that the melon jelly "can scarcely be said to pay for the trouble" is a good sample of the period's preserving literature, which was written for people counting sugar and fuel and not inclined to flatter a mediocre result.