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Preserved Citron Melon
To five pounds citron melon take three pounds sugar, nine lemons, two ounces green ginger root, and one teaspoon powdered alum. Peel melon and cut into rather thin slices, boiling until clear and tender in water containing the alum. Drain and wash in cold water. Have ready a syrup prepared by cooking together the sugar and juice of eight of the lemons, adding grated rinds of three and the ginger root, and cooking until clear and rather thick. Place in it the citron melon with one sliced lemon; place the melon in heated jars; pour into them the boiling syrup and seal while hot.
A classic preserving-melon recipe of the kind that once used up a crop no one would eat fresh. Two things need translating: what a citron melon actually is, and the alum.
- Citron melon is not a melon you eat rawThis is the preserving or stock melon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides), a hard, pale-fleshed watermelon relative with almost no sweetness or juice. It appears at farmers' markets and in seed catalogues but not in supermarkets. Ordinary watermelon flesh will collapse; watermelon rind, thickly cut and peeled of all green and pink, is the usual stand-in.
- The alumOne teaspoon of potassium alum in the blanching water firms the slices, and they are drained and washed in cold water afterward, so little remains. It is still sold in the spice aisle, but modern preserving practice has abandoned it in favour of a calcium chloride firming agent, or simply accepting softer fruit. Alum in quantity is a gastric irritant; do not increase it.
- Green ginger rootFresh ginger, not the powdered kind. Two ounces is a fair-sized knob, sliced thin so the flavour extracts and the pieces can be fished out or left in the jars.
- The lemons, divided three waysJuice from eight, grated zest from three of those eight, and a ninth sliced whole into the syrup. Grate the zest before juicing. The lemon is doing real work here: it supplies the acidity that keeps a very sweet preserve safe and stops the syrup crystallising.
- The step the recipe leaves outIt says to place the melon in the syrup but never says for how long. Simmer the drained slices in the finished syrup until they turn translucent and glassy, roughly 30 to 45 minutes depending on thickness, then jar them. Rushing this leaves opaque, chalky centres.
- Sealing while hot is not enoughOpen-kettle canning — hot syrup into hot jars, lid on, done — was standard practice when this was written and is no longer considered a reliable seal. Process the filled jars in a boiling water bath, 10 minutes for half-pints and pints, adjusting for altitude. The sugar and lemon make this a low-risk preserve, but an unprocessed seal can fail and grow mould.
- YieldFive pounds of melon with three pounds of sugar gives roughly five to six pints of preserve, depending on how far the syrup is reduced. Aim for a syrup that sheets slowly off a spoon; thinner than that and the fruit floats and the jars separate.
The citron melon was grown across the American South and Midwest not for the table but for the preserving kettle — its flesh is so firm and bland that it takes on whatever sugar, spice and acid it is cooked with, which is generally said to be why it was used as a cheap domestic substitute for true candied citron, the Mediterranean Citrus medica peel that went into fruitcakes and puddings and had to be imported at cost. Recipes of this sort turn up constantly in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks, and they follow a fixed pattern: alum-water blanch to firm the flesh, a rinse, then a long candying in lemon and ginger syrup. The plant escaped cultivation and is still considered a weed in parts of the South, a reminder that it was once planted in quantity by households that expected to spend late summer at the preserving kettle.