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Ripe Muskmelon Pickles
Take hard melons, after they are sufficiently ripe to be well flavored. Slice them lengthwise, scrape out the seed, and lay the melon in salt over night; wash and wipe dry, put them in alum water one hour, wash and wipe them again; cut them in slices and pack in jars. Pour over them a syrup of vinegar seasoned with cinnamon and cloves; put three or four pounds of sugar to one gallon vinegar, and boil until it is right thick.--Mrs. A. C.
This is a sweet spiced pickle of the kind Virginia households kept by the crockful, but as written it cannot be followed safely today. The points below explain what is missing and what the older terms mean.
- No measured acidityThe recipe gives a syrup of "one gallon vinegar" and three or four pounds of sugar but never states how much melon it covers, and vinegar strength in the 1870s was not standardised. Muskmelon is a low-acid fruit; without a known ratio of melon to vinegar there is no way to know the finished pickle is acid enough to be safe in a closed jar.
- No heat processing or sealThe melon is packed raw into jars and the boiled syrup poured over. There is no boiling-water bath, no processing time, and no description of sealing. That combination — low-acid produce, unverified acidity, an untreated closed container — is the situation that produces botulism risk. Use a current tested recipe for sweet melon pickle if you want to put some up.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard nineteenth-century crisping agent and is still sold, but the recipe specifies neither a quantity nor a water volume for the hour-long soak. Modern practice has largely abandoned alum for pickle firmness in favour of calcium chloride or simply not over-cooking the fruit.
- Overnight salting, unmeasured"Lay the melon in salt over night" means dry-salting to draw out water, not a brine of known strength. Salt at the time was coarse and variable, so the amount of water pulled from the melon — and therefore the dilution of the syrup later — is unpredictable.
- "Hard melons"Muskmelon here means Cucumis melo, the netted cantaloupe type. "Hard" signals firm, dense flesh that will hold its shape rather than a soft dessert-ripe melon; ripe enough for flavour, underripe enough to slice cleanly was the target.
- "Boil until it is right thick"A syrup instruction judged entirely by eye. No temperature or time is given, and the sugar concentration reached would have contributed to keeping quality alongside the vinegar.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1879, gathered contributions from a network of Virginia housewives, which is why many entries close with a set of initials rather than a full name. Sweet spiced pickles of this sort — melon, peach, watermelon rind, cucumber — were a fixture of the Southern table, set out with cold ham and roast meats to cut richness. Melon is more often met with as a rind pickle than as flesh, since the firm parts hold up to salting and long boiling; recipes calling for the whole sliced fruit, as here, depended on choosing a dense, barely-ripe melon. Alum in the soaking water was common in the period for keeping pickles crisp, and its use was criticised by some cookery writers later in the century.