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Pumpkin Preserved in Pieces
Pare off the outer skin, cut in halves, remove the seeds and divide each half into pieces about two inches square. Put them in a stone jar, add a half cup of salt to every five pounds of pumpkin. Cover with cold water and stand aside five hours, then drain and cover with fresh cold water. Soak two hours, changing the water three or four times. If you wish it crisp at the expense of health, dissolve a teaspoonful of powdered alum in two quarts of boiling water, add to the pumpkin and bring to boiling point. If the alum is omitted, bring the pumpkin to boiling point in the water; drain in a colander. Put two and a half pounds of granulated sugar and one and a half quarts of boiling water in a preserving kettle, boil and skim. When perfectly clear, put in the pumpkin and cook gently until you can pierce it with a wooden skewer or straw. Then lift each piece carefully with a skimmer and place it on a large plate. Stand in the sun two hours to harden. Chip the yellow rind from one large lemon, add to the syrup; add the juice of two lemons and a small piece of ginger root cut in thin slices. Boil ten minutes and stand aside to cool. When the pumpkin rind is hardened and cold, put in glass jars. Bring the syrup again to boiling point, strain it over the pumpkin and when cool, fasten or seal.
This is a sugar preserve in the nineteenth-century style, and the problem is not the syrup but the way the jars are filled and closed. The instructions cannot be followed safely today, so the notes below explain the sticking points rather than adapting them.
- No heat processing at allThe pumpkin is cooked, cooled on plates, packed cold into jars, and covered with hot syrup that is then "fastened or sealed." There is no boiling-water bath and no pressure processing, so nothing establishes a seal or destroys spores in the sealed jar. Pumpkin is a low-acid vegetable and this is precisely the pack in which Clostridium botulinum can grow undetected.
- Pumpkin is a special case in modern canningCurrent guidance allows pumpkin to be home-canned only as peeled cubes in liquid, in a pressure canner, and never as puree or mash. A syrup pack sealed by hand at the kitchen table is outside that guidance entirely. If you want preserved pumpkin, use a current tested recipe.
- Two hours in the sunCooked pieces left uncovered outdoors on plates sit for hours in the range where bacteria multiply fastest, and they collect whatever is in the air and on insects' feet. The purpose was to firm the surface so the cubes held their shape in syrup; it is not a step that can be salvaged.
- AlumThe author's own aside, "if you wish it crisp at the expense of health," shows that alum was already regarded with suspicion by the time this was written. Potassium alum was a standard crisping agent for pickles and preserves and irritates the stomach in quantity. It has no place in a modern kitchen recipe.
- The lemon juice is not a preservative hereTwo lemons' juice added to a quart and a half of syrup does not acidify several pounds of pumpkin to a safe pH. It is there for flavor and to keep the syrup from crystallizing, and it should not be mistaken for the acid that would make this pack shelf-stable.
- "Fasten or seal"The phrase leaves the closure to the cook: a wax disc, paper or bladder tied down, or a screw-top jar with a rubber ring were all in use. None of these produces the vacuum seal a modern two-piece lid gives after processing, which is part of why old preserves relied on very heavy sugar and frequent inspection.
- Archaic vessels and quantitiesA stone jar is a glazed earthenware crock, used because salt brine attacks metal. A preserving kettle is a wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy enameled pan chosen for fast evaporation. The proportions themselves are clear enough: half a cup of salt per five pounds of pumpkin, and roughly two and a half pounds of sugar to a quart and a half of water.
Preserved pumpkin belongs to the same family of thrift sweetmeats as watermelon-rind pickle, citron melon preserve and candied cucumber: firm, bland, cheap flesh cooked in heavy syrup until it turns translucent and takes on whatever flavor the cook adds, here lemon peel, lemon juice and a little ginger root. Vegetable cookery books of the 1890s and 1900s carried long preserving chapters. The parenthetical scolding about alum is a period marker in itself: domestic-science writers of these decades campaigned hard against alum, borax and salicylic acid in home and commercial food, and the phrase "at the expense of health" is the voice of that campaign appearing inside a recipe that otherwise assumes the reader will do as she likes.