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Sweet Pickled Watermelon
Mrs. Ruby Treptow. 4 T cinnamon sticks 4 T cloves (whole) Cut rind of watermelon into small pieces-about 2 inches square; cover with water and cook until tender. Boil sugar and vinegar 10 minutes, add spices tied in a bag, simmer until syrupy (about 2 hours); add melon rind and simmer 1 hour. Fill jars and seal.
This is a fragment as printed: the two ingredients that determine whether the pickle is safe to keep — the sugar and the vinegar — have no quantities at all, and there is no processing step. The notes below explain what is missing rather than how to proceed.
- Missing acid measurementWatermelon rind is a low-acid vegetable-like fruit, and the vinegar is the only thing standing between the jar and Clostridium botulinum. With no quantity of vinegar given, and no indication of its strength, there is no way to know whether the finished syrup reaches the pH below 4.6 that shelf storage requires.
- Missing sugar measurementThe sugar is not just sweetening; with the vinegar it makes the syrup that penetrates the rind and lowers water activity. "Boil sugar and vinegar 10 minutes" without amounts cannot be scaled or judged, and the two-hour reduction to "syrupy" depends entirely on the ratio the reader is not told.
- "Fill jars and seal" is not a processThe phrase says nothing about how long the filled jars are to be held at what temperature; it leaves the reader to hot syrup, hot jar, lid on, and trust the seal. Current practice for any sweet pickle is a measured boiling-water bath timed for the jar size and altitude. Nothing in this recipe supplies that, and an unprocessed seal on an unverified acid level is the specific failure mode here.
- The spice quantities do survive"4 T" is presumably four tablespoons each of stick cinnamon and whole cloves, tied in a bag as the recipe directs. That is a substantial quantity of whole spice, which suggests the batch was not a small one, but the recipe states no yield and the vanished sugar and vinegar figures cannot be reconstructed from it.
- Rind preparationThe recipe says only "rind of watermelon"; what is normally meant is the firm white layer with the green skin pared off and the pink flesh cut away, though the text does not say so. The two-inch squares are cut before the tenderising boil, not after, which the order of the instructions does make clear.
- If you want this pickleUse a current tested recipe for sweet pickled watermelon rind, which will give you vinegar strength, sugar weight and a processing time. This page is worth reading as a record, not as a set of instructions.
Sweet pickled watermelon rind is one of the great thrift preparations of American cookery — the part of the melon that would otherwise be thrown out, turned into something served alongside cold meat all winter. It appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and is associated with Southern and Pennsylvania German kitchens, and the cinnamon-and-clove syrup places it in the same family as spiced peaches and pickled crabapples. Its appearance under a contributor's name is typical of the community-cookbook genre, and quantities are often missing from such books. The gap where the sugar and vinegar should be is itself a document of how such books were made.