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Watermelon Pickle
4 pounds watermelon rind. 2 pounds sugar. 1 pint vinegar. Mace, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger to the taste. Peel the rind and cut in pieces; boil in ginger tea till clear, then throw in cold water overnight. Next morning make a syrup and preserve the rind; just before taking off the fire, pour in the vinegar.--Mrs. A. T.
A sweet-sour preserve of the kind every Virginia pantry once held. The instructions assume you already know what "preserve the rind" means; the notes below fill in the steps the original takes for granted.
- Prepare the rind properlyFour pounds means four pounds of trimmed rind, which may take one or two large melons depending on size. Pare off every trace of the green skin and scrape away all the pink flesh: any left behind turns soft and cloudy in the syrup. Cut into uniform pieces, about an inch, so they cook evenly.
- Ginger teaWater simmered with bruised ginger until it is strongly flavoured; the recipe gives no proportions. The rind is boiled in it until it turns clear, which will vary with the thickness of the pieces.
- The overnight soakDraining the hot rind into cold water firms it and stops the cooking. Older recipes often add lime or alum at this stage; this one does not, and the pickle is perfectly good without it, if slightly less crisp.
- Making the syrupDissolve the 2 lb sugar in water, add the whole spices, and bring to a boil before the drained rind goes in; the vinegar is held back until the end. "Preserve" here means simmering gently until the pieces are clear and glassy and the syrup has thickened.
- SpicesUse whole mace blades, cloves, cinnamon stick and dried ginger tied in a scrap of cheesecloth, not ground spice, which will muddy the syrup. A tablespoon of the mixture total is a reasonable starting point for this quantity.
- The vinegar at the endThe recipe adds it just before the pan comes off the fire; long boiling would drive off some of the sharpness. No type or strength of vinegar is specified, so an ordinary cider vinegar is a reasonable modern choice.
- StorageThe original assumes the jars will be eaten within the season from a cool cellar. Keep it in the refrigerator, where it will hold for a couple of months, and consult a current tested procedure if you want shelf-stable jars, since no processing time or method is given here.
- YieldNot stated in the original; expect several pints of finished pickle.
Watermelon rind pickle is thrift made ceremonial: the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the hogs, transformed by sugar and spice into something set out with cold ham at Sunday dinner. Sweet spiced pickles of this type descend from the English preserving tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where mace, cloves and cinnamon in a sugar-and-vinegar syrup were applied to everything from walnuts to mushrooms; the American South applied the method to a crop it grew in abundance. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from a wide circle of Virginia housekeepers, and the initialled attribution here, "Mrs. A. T.," is typical of the book's method. Its recipes were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the basics, which is why a step as substantial as making and boiling down a syrup gets four words.