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Canning-Rhubarb Jam
pieces. These pieces may be cut into fancy shapes or left plain. Put them in a stone jar, add a half cup of salt to every five pounds of citron. Cover with cold water, stand aside five hours.
Drain, cover with fresh, cold water, soak two hours, changing the water three or four times. If you wish them crisp, dissolve one teaspoonful of powdered alum in two quarts of boiling water, add the citron and bring to boiling point. Drain, throw into cold water fifteen minutes and drain again.
Make a syrup from two and a half pounds of granulated sugar, and one and a half quarts of boiling water. Boil and skim. This is to fifteen pounds of fruit. When the syrup is perfectly clear put in the citron and simmer until you can pierce it with a straw. Then lift it carefully with a skimmer and spread on large platters. Stand in the hot sun two hours to harden. Chip the yellow rind from one large lemon, add the syrup, then add the strained juice of two lemons, and one and a half ounces of green ginger root cut into thin slices. Boil gently ten minutes and stand aside until wanted.
When the citron hardens, put it, cold, into jars. Bring the syrup again to the boil, strain over the citron. Cover the jars and keep in a dark, dry place.
Watermelon rind may be preserved in precisely the same manner.
This is a fragment — the page opens mid-sentence, and the running head ("Canning-Rhubarb Jam") belongs to a neighbouring entry. What survives is a complete method for preserved citron melon, and it is a preserving procedure that current practice has left behind.
- Why it fails as a preserveTwo and a half pounds of sugar and a quart and a half of water are spread across fifteen pounds of fruit. That is nowhere near the sugar concentration that makes a preserve self-stabilising; the finished syrup is dilute enough to support microbial growth.
- No heat process, no sealThe fruit goes into the jars cold, boiling syrup is strained over it, and the jars are "covered" and set in a dark place. There is no water-bath or pressure processing, no vacuum seal, and no way to know the jar interior ever reached a safe temperature. Use a tested current recipe if you want shelf-stable preserves.
- Low-acid fruitCitron melon (and watermelon rind, the suggested substitute) is low in acid. The rind of one lemon and the strained juice of two, across fifteen pounds of fruit, does not acidify the pack meaningfully. In an unprocessed low-acid jar held at room temperature there is little to check spoilage organisms, and if the cover is anything like airtight, Clostridium botulinum becomes a genuine concern.
- The two hours in the sunSpreading hot fruit on platters and standing it in the sun to "harden" is an uncontrolled step at ambient temperature, open to insects, dust and airborne yeasts, before the fruit is jarred cold. The boiling syrup strained over it afterwards is no reliable correction.
- AlumPotassium alum was the standard nineteenth-century crisping agent and is still sold, but modern preserving guidance has dropped it — calcium salts do the job without the astringency, and alum in quantity is an irritant. Its appearance here is a marker of the recipe's age.
- "Citron"Almost certainly not the citrus. The closing note that watermelon rind may be preserved "in precisely the same manner" points to citron melon, or preserving melon, a hard, pale-fleshed watermelon relative grown for preserving rather than for eating fresh; it is rarely sold now outside heirloom seed catalogues. That comparison also tells you what texture the recipe is after.
- Other archaic termsA stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock, used because salt and acid attack metal. "Green ginger root" is simply fresh ginger, as opposed to the dried and ground kind. "Pierce it with a straw" means a stiff broom straw, the period test for tenderness in candied fruit.
Candied citron melon belongs to the long tradition of preserving what would otherwise be thrown away — the tough rind and the hard-fleshed melon grown for no other purpose. Through the nineteenth century citron preserve and watermelon-rind pickle were staples of the American household store cupboard, valued because they held their shape and gave a firm, translucent bite in cakes and on the relish plate. The techniques on display here are all pre-scientific: salt brining to draw water, alum to firm the pectin, a sun-drying step to set the surface, and a syrup judged clear by eye rather than by thermometer or refractometer. Books of this period were written before the home-canning research of the twentieth century established what temperatures and acidities actually make a jar safe, which is why so many of their preserving directions end with "cover the jars and keep in a dark, dry place" and nothing more.