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Preserved Pumpkin
Pare off the outer skin and cut the pumpkin in halves. Remove the seeds and divide each half into a number of smaller pieces. Cut or chip these into very small, thin shavings. To each quart of these chips allow one large orange. Shave the orange, rind and all, into thin slices, avoiding the core in the centre. Add the orange to the pumpkin, cover with two quarts of cold water and stand in a cold place over night. In the morning cook slowly .
A candied-style pumpkin preserve built on two ingredients: thin pumpkin shavings and a whole sliced orange, softened by an overnight soak before slow cooking. The success of it rests entirely on how thin the shavings are.
- Shave, don't diceThe pumpkin must be cut into genuinely thin, translucent chips, not cubes. Thick pieces will not take up syrup evenly and stay woody at the centre; a mandoline or a sturdy vegetable peeler gives a better result than a knife.
- Choose a dense pumpkinUse a firm cooking variety such as a sugar pie pumpkin, kabocha or butternut. A large field or jack-o'-lantern pumpkin is watery and stringy and will collapse into pulp rather than holding as chips.
- Measuring by the quartThe pumpkin is measured by volume, not weight: a quart of loose chips is 4 cups, which works out at roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of prepared pumpkin. One orange per quart of chips is the ratio to keep if you scale up.
- The whole orangeRind and all means the peel goes in, so scrub the orange well; most supermarket citrus carries a food-grade wax coating. Cut out the seeds along with the fibrous core as you slice, since they turn bitter with long cooking.
- The overnight soakTwo quarts of cold water to each quart of chips, left in a cold place, softens the pumpkin ahead of cooking. A refrigerator is the cold place now; a covered bowl overnight, 8 to 12 hours, is enough.
- SugarThe text as printed gives no sugar quantity, and a preserve of this type cannot be made without it. Preserves of the period were generally built on roughly equal weights of sugar and prepared fruit, but that is a convention rather than this cook's stated proportion.
- "Cook slowly"The text stops at 'cook slowly' and gives no time. Slow should mean a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil; expect to cook until the pumpkin chips go translucent and the syrup thickens, which is likely to take an hour or more. A hard boil breaks the shavings apart before the syrup thickens.
- Keeping itTreat the finished preserve as a fresh refrigerator product, good for a few weeks in a clean covered jar. If you want it shelf-stable, follow a current tested canning procedure with specified jar sizes and processing times rather than simply sealing hot jars.
Preserved pumpkin belongs to a long line of thrift preserves, in which a cheap, bulky, near-flavourless vegetable is carried by sugar and citrus into something that reads as a sweetmeat. The same trick arguably underlies vegetable-marrow jam, green tomato preserve and, by some readings, candied citron peel; the pumpkin contributes texture and body while the orange supplies the aroma and the acidity that a squash entirely lacks. Pumpkins kept well in a cool cellar through the winter, which made them a standing resource in American and English households well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period routinely place preserves like this one in the vegetable chapter rather than among the sweets, on the grounds of what it is made from rather than how it is eaten. Served with cold meat or on bread and butter, it is closer to a conserve than a jam.