Home › Cookery › Ripe Muskmelon Preserves
Ripe Muskmelon Preserves
Peel and slice the melons, soak them twenty-four hours in salt water, twenty-four hours in alum water, and twenty-four hours in fresh water, changing the latter several times. Then make a strong ginger tea, in which boil them slowly till they taste of ginger.
Make a syrup, allowing a pound and a half sugar to each pound fruit, and adding mace and sliced ginger (the latter must be soaked in boiling water twelve hours before it is wanted). Cook the melon in the syrup till clear and tender. You may use sliced lemons as a seasoning instead of ginger.--Mrs. R. L.
A three-day soak followed by a heavy sugar syrup, in the standard nineteenth-century pattern for turning bland melon into a firm, translucent sweetmeat. Nearly everything that matters here is in the soaking and the fruit you start with.
- Choose firm, barely ripe melonAnything at full eating ripeness will collapse into threads in the syrup; pick a melon that resists a thumbnail, and cut the flesh in thick slices as the recipe directs.
- The brine and alum are unmeasuredThe recipe specifies neither. As a modern starting point, a strong brine of roughly 1/2 cup salt per quart of water, and about a teaspoon of powdered alum per quart. Alum (potassium aluminum sulfate) is still sold as a food additive and was used to firm fruit; current preserving practice has dropped it in favour of simply using underripe fruit, and it can leave a faintly metallic edge. Rinse and soak in fresh water exactly as long as directed if you use it.
- Ginger teaSimmer 2-3 oz sliced dried or fresh ginger in a quart of water for about 20 minutes to get something like the "strong tea." The recipe gives no times: poach the melon in it until it tastes of ginger, perhaps 20-30 minutes for thick slices; it should be barely translucent but not falling apart.
- Soaking the sliced gingerA twelve-hour boiling-water soak points to dried whole ginger root, which is rock hard, though the recipe does not say. Fresh ginger needs no soaking at all - slice it thin and add it straight to the syrup.
- Syrup proportionA pound and a half of sugar to each pound of fruit gives a very dense, candied preserve, and the sugar is what keeps it. Cutting it back to equal weights gives a softer, more modern preserve but a looser set and a shorter life.
- "Till clear and tender"This is the hinge. Cook at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and stop when the pieces have gone from opaque white to glassy - anywhere from 45 minutes to well over an hour. Hard boiling drives water out of the surface faster than sugar goes in and leaves tough, shrunken cubes.
- StorageThe recipe says nothing about jars or keeping. Melon is a low-acid fruit, so if you intend to shelf-store this, follow a current tested preserving recipe with its acid and processing times; otherwise cool it, jar it, and keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for several weeks.
- YieldA medium melon yields roughly 2 lb of prepared flesh, which with the full weight of sugar makes several half-pint jars. Serve it as a condiment with cold ham or on buttered bread.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree in 1879 from contributions credited variously by full name and by initials, is full of recipes like this one - long, patient sweetmeats built on cheap garden surplus. Melon preserves belong to the same Southern family as watermelon-rind pickle and the so-called "mangoes" made from muskmelon: firm, cheap, nearly flavourless flesh soaked and candied until it could stand in for imported ginger or citron on the tea table. Alum and lime soaks were a common way of firming fruit through the nineteenth century, and turn up in preserving chapters of the period; they fell out of use only as tested canning guidance in the twentieth century concluded that choosing underripe fruit did the same job. The ginger, then imported dried and whole, is softened according to instructions the recipe takes care to spell out, and sliced lemon at the end is offered as an alternative seasoning.