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Watermelon Honey
Use the red portion only. Crush and strain it or cook down (with seeds) till very soft and then strain, cooking again till thick. (Three quarts of red pulp will make but about one-fifth pint of "honey.") This requires time and patience. Cool the honey, then proceed as with grape juice in bottling. It is best without sugar but a little sugar and lemon juice may be added, the "honey" alone not keeping so well.
This is a reduction, not a preserve in the usual sense: watermelon juice boiled down until it is a dark syrup. The numbers in the original are worth reading carefully before you commit a melon to it.
- The yield is the headlineThree quarts of red pulp gives about one-fifth of a pint, roughly 3 fluid ounces, a scant half cup. That is roughly a thirty-to-one reduction, so a great deal of melon becomes a very small jar.
- Archaic measuresA pint here is the US 16 fl oz pint, so one-fifth pint is about 100 ml. If a gill appears elsewhere in this book, read it as half a cup.
- Straining is the hingeWatermelon juice throws a great deal of pale pulp and froth as it heats. Strain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth before the long boil, and skim the scum in the first fifteen minutes; anything left behind scorches later and turns the syrup bitter.
- Wide pan, patient heatUse the widest pan you have for the bulk of the evaporation, then move to a small heavy saucepan for the last cup or so. The final stage goes from syrup to burnt sugar quickly; once it thickens it wants low heat and constant attention.
- TimeThe book says only that it requires time and patience. In practice, expect three to five hours on a domestic stove for three quarts, most of it unattended simmering, with the last half hour needing you at the pan.
- Sugar and lemonWatermelon is low in acid and low in pectin, so the syrup tastes flat and cloying without help. A tablespoon of lemon juice per cup of finished honey sharpens it noticeably; the sugar the author mentions is for keeping, not sweetness.
- Do not seal it by the book's methodDo not rely on the book's sealing method -- "proceed as with grape juice in bottling" refers to a procedure not given here, and no home bottling of this kind should be treated as a safe seal for a low-acid product. Keep the finished honey in the refrigerator, where it will hold for weeks, or freeze it in small jars. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested procedure.
- Using itTreat it as a molasses: on pancakes and cornbread, stirred into yogurt, or brushed on roast pork near the end. The flavor is closer to sorghum than to fresh melon.
Boiling watermelon juice down to a syrup is an old thrift technique from places where melons were abundant and sugar was not. It appears in the Volga and southern Russian tradition, where the product is called nardek or "watermelon honey," and also in the American South as watermelon molasses. Its presence in an American fruit book belongs to a moment when honey and molasses substitutes were of genuine domestic interest. The author's honesty about the yield — three quarts of pulp for a few spoonfuls — tells you why the practice survived mainly where melons were free for the taking.