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Sweet Watermelon Pickle
Trim the rinds nicely, being careful to cut off the hard coating with the outer green. Weigh ten pounds rind and throw it in a kettle, and cover with soft water; let this boil gently for half an hour, take it off and lay it on dishes to drain. Next morning put one quart vinegar, three pounds brown sugar, one ounce cinnamon, one ounce mace, the white of one egg well beaten and thrown on top of the liquid (to clear it as you would jelly), three teaspoonfuls turmeric, all together in a kettle, and boil for a few minutes; skim off what rises as scum with the egg. Throw in the rind, and boil for twenty minutes. The peel of two fresh lemons will give a nice flavor, though not at all necessary.--Mrs. L. W. C.
A classic sweet rind pickle, written for a household putting up a bushel of melon at a time. The quantities are large and the storage instructions are absent, so both need thought before you start.
- Scale it downTen pounds of trimmed rind is a very large batch, the rind of several large watermelons. A tenth of the recipe — one pound of rind, a scant 1/2 cup vinegar, about 5 oz brown sugar — behaves the same way and makes roughly a pint.
- Trimming is the whole job"Cut off the hard coating with the outer green" means every trace of dark green skin and every scrap of pink flesh. Green skin stays leathery and never candies; leftover flesh disintegrates into the syrup and clouds it.
- Soft waterRainwater or soft well water is what the recipe calls for; period cooks generally held that hard water toughened pickles and dulled their color. Filtered or distilled water does the same job. Do not add alum or soda, which some period recipes call for and which is no longer recommended.
- The hinge: cook the rind tender firstAfter the half-hour boil the rind should be translucent at the edge and yield easily to a fork. If it goes into the sugar syrup still firm, the sugar sets the surface and it stays hard no matter how long you boil it afterwards.
- Egg-white clarification is obsoleteBeaten white was thrown on the syrup to raise the impurities in unrefined 19th-century brown sugar as a scum. Modern brown sugar is clean; skip the egg and simply skim any foam.
- Spice quantities and formAn ounce each of cinnamon and mace is about 4 tablespoons ground — assume the writer meant whole stick cinnamon and whole blades of mace, tied in a cloth bag and lifted out at the end. Ground spice in that volume makes a gritty, muddy pickle.
- TurmericThree teaspoons is purely for the yellow-gold color that was fashionable in sweet pickles. It contributes a faint earthiness and can be reduced or left out with no harm to the flavor.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied widely. Use a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar; anything labeled for cleaning is too strong to eat.
- Storage, which the recipe omitsThe rind releases water and dilutes the syrup, so this is not a shelf-stable preserve as written. Pack hot into clean jars and keep refrigerated, where it will hold for a month or two, or follow a current tested water-bath process if you intend to store it in the pantry.
Watermelon rind pickle is thrift made ornamental: the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the hogs, boiled tender and candied in spiced vinegar until it looks like translucent amber. It belongs to the broad family of sweet-sour "sweetmeat" pickles that filled the Anglo-American preserving closet in the 18th and 19th centuries, where sugar and vinegar together did the preserving work and a jar was expected to sit on the table beside cold meat. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered such receipts from contributing housekeepers and printed them under their initials, as here with Mrs. L. W. C. — a format that preserves the individual hand, including the aside that lemon peel is nice "though not at all necessary." The turmeric and mace are a reminder of how far the spice trade reached into an ordinary Southern kitchen, and the egg-white clarification, borrowed straight from jelly-making, shows a cook working with unrefined sugar that genuinely needed clearing.