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Cantaloupe Pickle
Cut up ripe melons into small square pieces, peel and scrape out the soft pulp and seeds, soak one night in alum water, and then boil in strong ginger tea. Then to each pound of fruit add three-quarters of a pound loaf sugar, mace, cinnamon, and white ginger to the taste, and cover with best cider vinegar. Boil till it can be pierced with a straw, then set aside, and the next day pour off, and boil the syrup until it thickens a little, and return to the fruit boiling-hot.--Mrs. F. F. F.
Cantaloupe Pickle.
Pare and cut in small pieces, cover with vinegar; pour off and measure, and to each pint put three-quarters of a pound brown sugar cloves and mace to your taste.
Boil the syrup, put in the fruit and boil until clear; then take out the fruit, boil a few minutes longer, and pour it on the pickles, hot. When cold, it is ready for use.--Mrs. E. I.
Cantaloupe Pickle.
Take four or five cantaloupes, quarter, and cover with vinegar; to stand twenty-four hours. Then measure off the vinegar, leaving out one quart. To each quart, add three pounds brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and mace to the taste. Place the spiced vinegar over the fire, and when it has boiled awhile drop in the fruit, cooking it thirty or forty minutes.--Mrs. R. P.
Three separate contributors' versions of the same sweet spiced melon pickle, printed one after another. All three are vinegar-and-sugar preserves rather than brine pickles, and all assume you know how to judge a melon and a syrup.
- Choose the melon carefullyThe recipe says "ripe," but a soft, fragrant modern cantaloupe will collapse into mush in the syrup, so firm fruit is the safer choice. "Small square pieces" is the only guidance given; pieces of roughly an inch hold their shape and turn translucent as they cook.
- The alum soakAlum (potassium aluminium sulphate) was a common nineteenth-century firming agent and is still sold as pickling alum. The recipe gives no proportion; modern instructions usually suggest something on the order of a tablespoon per quart of water. The melon then needs a thorough rinse in fresh water before it goes near the syrup. Modern pickling generally skips it and relies on firm fruit and short cooking instead.
- Ginger teaMrs. F. F. F.'s "strong ginger tea" is simply water simmered with bruised dried ginger root until strongly flavoured, used here as the blanching liquid. "White ginger" later in the same recipe means peeled dried ginger, the pale grade, not a different spice.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken and crushed for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight. The brown sugar in the other two versions gives a darker syrup and a slight molasses note.
- The proportions differ sharplyMrs. F. F. F. works by weight of fruit (3/4 lb sugar per pound), Mrs. E. I. by volume of drained vinegar (3/4 lb per pint), Mrs. R. P. by a much heavier 3 lb per quart of vinegar. The third is very sweet by modern taste; the first is the most balanced starting point.
- "Pierced with a straw"Mrs. F. F. F.'s doneness test (the other two go by clarity or by a timed thirty to forty minutes): a broom straw, with a thin skewer or cake tester the modern equivalent, sliding in with no resistance. Reckon on something in the region of half an hour of gentle simmering, and stop while the pieces are still holding together.
- Why the syrup is boiled separatelyThe melon releases water overnight and thins the syrup. Draining it off, reducing it, and pouring it back boiling hot concentrates the sugar without overcooking the fruit. The recipe calls for one such round, on the day after the first boiling.
- SpicesUse whole cloves, blades of mace and stick cinnamon in a muslin bag rather than ground spice, which clouds the syrup. Roughly a tablespoon of mixed whole spice per quart of vinegar is a reasonable reading of "to the taste."
- StorageNothing here is measured for acidity and no processing is described, so treat the result as a refrigerator pickle in clean jars rather than a shelf-stable preserve. It will keep several weeks cold and improves after the first week.
- YieldNot stated. As a rough estimate, four or five cantaloupes as in Mrs. R. P.'s version should give something in the range of six to eight pints of finished pickle, a single melon a pint and a half.
Sweet spiced melon pickle was a fixture of Southern larders in the nineteenth century, when preserving surplus summer fruit in sugar and vinegar was a routine August chore rather than a hobby. Melons of all kinds were treated this way, cantaloupe and watermelon rind especially, and the resulting pickle was served as a relish beside cold ham, roast pork or game. That three contributors to Housekeeping in Old Virginia submitted versions under the same heading tells you how common the preparation was; Marion Cabell Tyree's 1879 compilation gathered recipes from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers and printed them side by side without reconciling their differences, which is why the sugar-to-vinegar ratios here vary by a factor of two. The alum soak, a firming step, was widely recommended in period cookbooks; the ginger-tea blanch, which both firms and flavours, appears here alongside it.