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Spiced Cantaloupe (Cut the cantaloupes in halves)
Cut the cantaloupes in halves, remove the seeds, then cut in thin sections, take off the rind. When you have a sufficient quantity, weigh the pieces and to each seven pounds allow :- 4 pounds of sugar, 1/2 ounce of ginger root, 1 pint of vinegar, 1 teaspoonful of ground cloves, 2 teaspoonfuls of ground allspice, 2 teaspoonfuls ground cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoonful of ground mace.
Mix the spices and divide them into four parts; put each part in a small square of muslin, tie tightly, allowing sufficient room for the spices to swell. Put the sugar and vinegar in a porcelain-lined kettle, add the spices, and ginger root, scraped and cut into slices. Stand the kettle over the fire, and when the contents are boiling add the cantaloupe. Take at once from the fire and stand aside in a cool place over night. Next day, drain all the liquor from the cantaloupes and in a porcelain kettle bring it again to the boiling point. Pour this over the cantaloupes and stand aside until the next day. The following morning drain and heat the syrup as before, and do this for nine consecutive days. The last day boil the cantaloupes until perfectly tender, a small quantity at a time. Then the liquor must be boiled down until a thick syrup and just enough to cover the fruit. Put in jars or tumblers and tie up for keeping.
The following fruits must be spiced in precisely the same manner, and if directions are carefully followed success is sure, and the fruit will be perfectly delicious:- Apples, peaches, cherries, pears, plums, quinces, watermelon.
This is a nine-day sweet pickle of the kind that filled turn-of-the-century store cupboards, and it cannot be reproduced safely by the method given. The notes below explain the vessels and terms, and then why the preserving step fails.
- Why it fails: melon is a low-acid fruitCantaloupe flesh sits around pH 6.2, well above the 4.6 threshold that keeps Clostridium botulinum in check. One pint of vinegar spread across seven pounds of fruit plus four pounds of sugar gives no reliable final acidity, and the recipe offers no way to measure it. Tested home-preserving recipes for pickled cantaloupe are hard to come by; watermelon rind pickle, which the closing list also mentions, does have current tested versions.
- Why it fails: no heat process and no seal"Put in jars or tumblers and tie up for keeping" means a paper or cloth cover tied with string over drinking glasses, the standard nineteenth-century closure for jams. Nothing is processed after filling and nothing is hermetically sealed, so the contents depend entirely on sugar concentration and surface drying to hold. A current, tested recipe with a specified processing time should be used instead.
- The nine-day drain-and-pourRepeatedly draining the syrup, reboiling it and pouring it back was the way to candy firm fruit without collapsing it: each cycle raises the sugar concentration a little, drawing water out of the flesh slowly rather than shocking it. The technique is sound; it is the storage that is not.
- Porcelain-lined kettleAn enamelled iron or steel pan. The point is that vinegar and fruit acids attack bare iron and copper, giving metallic flavours and grey syrup. Stainless steel serves the same purpose now.
- Weights, not volumesThe proportions are given by weight of prepared fruit after seeding and peeling, which is roughly half the weight of whole melons. Seven pounds of pieces is a substantial batch, on the order of four to five average cantaloupes.
- Ginger root and the spice bagsHalf an ounce is about 15 g of fresh or dried whole root, scraped and sliced, not ground ginger. Dividing the ground spices among four loose muslin bags keeps the syrup clear and lets the bags be lifted out; ground spice loose in the pan would cloud and darken it over nine days.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold ground or as "blades." It is lighter and more floral than nutmeg; half a teaspoon in this quantity is a background note rather than a dominant one.
Spiced fruits belonged to a specific place at the American table of the later nineteenth century: served cold in small quantities alongside roast meats and cold cuts. Cantaloupes and muskmelons were abundant, cheap and highly perishable in late summer, and a household with no refrigeration converted the surplus into something that would keep on a shelf, using sugar and vinegar together in a ratio that reads as startlingly sweet now. The closing list of interchangeable fruits — apples, peaches, cherries, pears, plums, quinces, watermelon — is characteristic of period cookery writing, where a method mattered more than a named dish and the same nine-day routine was applied to whatever the orchard sent in. Sweet spiced pickles of this family are generally traced to English "pickled" fruit receipts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which used the same clove, allspice, cinnamon and mace combination.