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Ripe Muskmelon or Watermelon Preserves
During the summer, peel and slice indifferent cantaleupes (such as you do not care to eat), especially such as are not quite ripe. Throw them into brine, together with your thickest watermelon rinds, peeling off the outside skin. When you have enough, weigh them, throw them in fresh water, which change daily till the salt is extracted. Boil in a preserving kettle till soft enough to pierce with a straw. Make a syrup, allowing one pound sugar for each pound fruit. When it boils, put the rind in it and simmer steadily till the rind is transparent and the syrup thick. When cool, add the juice and grated rind of twelve lemons. Let it stand in a bowl several days. Then strain the syrup (which will have become thin), boil it again, pour over the rind, and put the preserves in glass jars with screw tops.--Mrs. S. T.
A thrift preserve that turns unripe cantaloupe and watermelon rind into candied fruit in lemon syrup. The method is sound but assumes you know several things the text leaves out.
- The hinge: don't rush the syrupThe rind must simmer steadily until it is genuinely translucent all the way through — that is the sugar replacing the water in the flesh, and it can take an hour or more. Pulled early, the pieces stay opaque and chalky in the center and will not keep well.
- The brineNo strength is given. This is a holding brine, strong enough to firm the rind and keep it while you accumulate more; period recipes of this kind rarely specify a strength, and any figure you see quoted is a modern reconstruction rather than a documented standard. It is a storage step, not a seasoning step, and the fresh-water soaks are meant to draw it back out.
- Extracting the saltChange the water daily for two to three days and taste a sliver before you proceed. Residual salt is easy to leave behind, and once the sugar goes in you cannot correct it.
- "Pierce with a straw"A broom straw was the standard doneness probe. A cake tester or thin skewer does the same job: it should enter with slight resistance, not slide through as if through butter.
- Weigh the fruitThe one pound sugar to one pound fruit ratio is the whole preservation system. Note that the recipe weighs the fruit after brining but before the fresh-water soaks; weigh the peeled, trimmed pieces, and cut the rind to a similar thickness or the thin ones will collapse.
- Twelve lemonsThat is a large batch — roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of juice — and suits perhaps 8 to 10 pounds of fruit. Scale the lemons to your quantity, and add them off the heat as directed; the fresh flavor of raw zest is the point of adding them late.
- The days of standingThe rind and the syrup go on exchanging sugar and water, which is why the syrup thins and has to be strained, reboiled and poured back. Do this in the refrigerator rather than on a counter, and reduce the strained syrup until it sheets off a spoon before it goes back over the fruit.
- Sealing"Glass jars with screw tops" predates modern canning practice. Fill hot jars with hot preserves and process in a boiling water bath for shelf storage, or skip the processing and keep the jars refrigerated and use them within a couple of months.
Watermelon-rind preserves belong to a whole class of Southern sweets built on what would otherwise go in the slop bucket — the melon rind, the unripe cantaloupe, the citron and the green tomato. A household with sugar to spare could afford to spend a pound of it on a pound of rind that had cost nothing. The instruction to use melons "such as you do not care to eat" is the plain statement of the logic: firm, underripe, low-flavored flesh takes up syrup and holds its shape, where a ripe melon would dissolve. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, and the "Mrs. S. T." signature is typical of the book's method — a compiled community cookbook rather than a single author's work, which is also why the measurements assume a reader who already knew how strong to make a brine.