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Carrot Marmalade (C chopped carrots C sugar Rind)
1 C chopped carrots 3/4 C sugar Rind 12 lemon Rowena M. Nutt.
Enough water to just about cover it Pinch salt Cook water, lemon rind, and carrots until tender. Then add lemon juice, salt and sugar to the cooked mixture. Cook until thick. Put into sterilized, jelly glasses.
Mrs. Kruckman. 5 lb. cherries, pitted 4 lb. sugar 1 pt. vinegar
A community-cookbook page in rough shape: the marmalade is complete enough to follow, but it has been typeset over two contributors' names and the first three lines of an unrelated spiced-cherry recipe have been swept in at the end. The shelf-storage instruction is the part that cannot stand.
- Why it fails as writtenWhy it is not safe to follow as written -- Carrot is a low-acid vegetable, and the only acid here is the juice of an unspecified quantity of lemon. A vegetable preserve of unknown acidity, put up in jelly glasses and kept on a shelf, is the kind of preparation food-safety services warn against because Clostridium botulinum can survive in it; "cook until thick" does not address the acid level. Use a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service if you want a shelf-stable carrot marmalade.
- "Sterilized jelly glasses"In community cookbooks of this period this commonly meant scalded tumblers sealed with a disc of melted paraffin wax, though the recipe does not say so. Paraffin seals are no longer considered sound for preserves: the wax shrinks and cracks and can admit mould, and they have long since dropped out of home-canning guidance.
- The lemon quantity is unreadable"Rind 12 lemon" is almost certainly a lost fraction — 1/2 lemon, or possibly 1 or 2 lemons. Since the acid load determines whether this is a safe preserve at all, the ambiguity is not something to guess at.
- C means cupStandard abbreviation in mid-century American club cookbooks. So one cup chopped carrot to three-quarters cup sugar — a very small batch, yielding roughly a single half-pint at most.
- The stray lines at the end"5 lb. cherries, pitted / 4 lb. sugar / 1 pt. vinegar" has nothing to do with carrots. It is the opening ingredient list of a separate recipe — the vinegar suggests a spiced or pickled cherry — swept in from an adjoining entry.
- Two names, one recipeRowena M. Nutt appears mid-ingredient-list and Mrs. Kruckman at the close. One of these signatures most likely belongs to a neighbouring entry rather than to the marmalade.
Carrot marmalade belongs to a family of thrift preserves that treated a cheap root vegetable as if it were citrus: the carrot supplies bulk, sweetness and a convincing orange colour, while lemon rind and juice supply the bitterness and set that carrots lack. Recipes of this kind circulated widely in Britain and North America during both World Wars and the Depression years between them, when sugar and imported fruit were dear and a garden row of carrots was not. Books of this kind were assembled from whatever cards the members handed in, which accounts for the minimal instruction, the signed contributions, and the assumption that the reader already knows how a preserve behaves in the pan.