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Sweetmeat Preserves
Cut the rind in any shapes fancied (such as flowers, fruits, leaves, grapes, fish, etc.), put it in brine strong enough to float an egg, cover closely with grape leaves, and set away the jar. When ready to make the preserves, soak the rind in fresh water, changing it till all taste of salt is removed from the rind. Dissolve four tablespoonfuls pulverized alum in one gallon water. Lay the rind in this, covered closely with grape or cabbage leaves. Simmer till it becomes a pretty green, then soak out the alum by throwing the rind in soft water.
Pour boiling water on half a pound white ginger, and let it stand long enough to soften sufficiently to slice easily in thin pieces (retaining the shapes of the races as much as possible). Then boil it an hour in half a gallon water, and add one ounce mace and two pounds best cut sugar. This makes a thin syrup, in which boil the rind gently for half an hour, adding water to keep the rind covered with syrup.
Set the kettle away for four days and then boil again as before, adding two pounds sugar and more water, if necessary. Repeat the boiling six or seven times, till the syrup is rich and thick and sufficient to cover the rind. The quantity of seasoning given above is for three gallons rind. Allow two pounds sugar to each pound fruit. This sweetmeat keeps indefinitely and never ferments.--Mrs. F. M. C.
This is a watermelon-rind sweetmeat of the old Southern kind, and it depends on two practices that have since been abandoned: a long salt cure in an open jar, and a deliberate alum bath used to turn the rind green and hold it firm. The alum is the reason this cannot be followed today; a current tested recipe for watermelon rind preserves should be used instead.
- The alum bath is out of food rangeThe alum bath is heavy -- Four tablespoonfuls of pulverized alum to a gallon of water, then simmered with the rind, is far more than a trace pickling aid. Current USDA and extension guidance no longer recommends alum as a firming agent, and the recipe's rinse in "soft water" cannot be assumed to remove all of what has been simmered in.
- The greening is the point of it, and that is the problemSimmering "till it becomes a pretty green" is a colour effect produced by the alum and the leaves, not a doneness cue. There is no way to follow the instruction as given without carrying out the alum step it depends on.
- Brine "strong enough to float an egg"An old rule of thumb for a heavy brine, on the order of ten percent salt rather than a saturated solution. The jar is simply covered with grape leaves and set away, with no seal and no acid; the salt did the work. It is a curing method with no measured quantities, times or temperatures, which is why it does not translate.
- No sealing, no processingThe claim that it "keeps indefinitely and never ferments" rests on an extremely heavy sugar syrup built up over six or seven boilings. Nothing here calls for sterilised jars, a seal, or a boiling-water bath, and the finished preserve is simply left in the kettle between boilings for four days at a stretch.
- Reading the ingredients"White ginger" is dried, peeled root ginger; "races" are the branched hands of the rhizome, which the cook is told to keep recognisable when slicing. "Best cut sugar" means loaf sugar broken into lumps, the highest-refined grade then sold. "Soft water" is rainwater or any water low in minerals.
- The scaleThree gallons of prepared rind is the batch this seasoning is written for, with two pounds of sugar to each pound of fruit. That is a putting-up-for-the-year quantity, not an afternoon's work.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, is a collection of contributed receipts, and this one carries the initials of its donor in the usual way. The recipe never names the fruit; the treatment fits the nineteenth-century family of sweetmeats made from what would otherwise be thrown out -- melon rind, the citron melon, green tomatoes, unripe walnuts. The cutting of the rind into flowers, grapes and fish suggests company food rather than thrift alone, meant to be handed round on a glass dish with cake. Alum-and-leaf greening appears widely in British and American preserving books of the century, alongside the older and more alarming habit of brightening pickles in a copper or brass kettle; both were argued over by writers of the period, and both were eventually dropped once the chemistry was better understood. The long series of boilings with sugar added each time is the classic method for driving syrup gradually into a dense fruit without collapsing it.