Home › Preserve Recipes › Pumpkin Preserve
Pumpkin Preserve
I lb. (2 cups) sugar 2 lemons 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger Water Peel, slice, and remove the seeds from the pumpkin, then weigh it. For each pound take one pound of sugar. Lay the pumpkin in a large earthenware dish, and sprinkle the sugar between the layers.
Moisten the sugar with the strained lemon juice, cover with a cloth, and leave for three days. Place in an earthenware pan, adding half a pint of water for each three pounds of sugar, the ginger, and the grated rind of one lemon. Simmer till quite tender, and turn into a large bowl.
Cover and leave for six days. Lay the slices of pumpkin in dry jars, boil the syrup until it thickens, pour into the jars, and tie down immediately.
Quinces Sugar
This is a candied-pumpkin preserve of the old sort: slices steeped in their own sugar syrup over the better part of a fortnight, then jarred with no heat processing at all. The method cannot be made safe by adjusting it, and the points below explain where it fails and how to read the text.
- Why it fails: pumpkin is low-acidPumpkin sits well above pH 4.6, and the juice of two lemons spread through several pounds of flesh does not bring it down reliably or evenly. A sealed, unprocessed low-acid preserve is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, which is why current guidance allows home-canned pumpkin only as pressure-processed cubes and rejects pumpkin butter and pur ed pumpkin; there is no tested process for a syrup preserve of this kind.
- Why it fails: nine days at room temperatureThree days under a cloth, then six more in a covered bowl, is an open invitation to mould and yeast before the syrup ever reaches its final concentration. A modern kitchen at 20C is a warmer environment than the larder such a recipe would have been made in.
- Why it fails: "tie down immediately"Tying down normally meant a disc of paper or parchment over the jar mouth, secured with string. That excludes dust, not micro-organisms, and it is not a vacuum seal. There is no sterilisation of the jars and no processing of the filled jars in the instructions.
- Why it fails: no measured sugar concentrationSugar preserves keep by low water activity, which means a syrup boiled to a known density. "Boil the syrup until it thickens" gives no target, and the pumpkin releases a great deal of water into it, so the finished concentration is unknown. Nothing in the recipe guarantees the syrup is strong enough to preserve anything.
- Reading the ingredient listThe quantities as printed are incomplete: no weight of pumpkin is given, because the rule is one pound of sugar per pound of prepared flesh, and the lemons and ginger are scaled to a single pound. The trailing "Quinces Sugar" belongs to the next recipe in the section, not to this one.
- "Earthenware pan" and half a pintThe earthenware pan here is the cooking vessel itself, distinct from the earthenware dish used for the cold steep. The half pint added is an Imperial half pint, 10 fl oz or about 285 ml, rather than the US 8 oz.
- If you want candied pumpkinUse a current tested recipe from a reputable preserving authority, one that specifies either refrigerated short-term storage or a properly acidified and processed pack.
Preserving pumpkin and other bland squashes in heavy syrup is an old economy: the flesh contributes texture and bulk while the sugar, lemon and ginger supply everything else, which is much the same logic behind the Spanish cabello de cgel made from cidra squash and the mock-citron and mock-ginger preserves that turn up across nineteenth-century British and American household books. The long cold steep here, sugar layered between slices for days before any heat is applied, is the standard candying technique of the period: it draws water out of the flesh gradually so the slices stay whole and translucent instead of collapsing, and the six-day rest after simmering lets the syrup penetrate to the centre.