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Watermelon Pickle
Jeanie S. Burridge.
Prepare rinds, cover with water, add 2 t salt to each gallon of rinds, and boil until you can pierce with a silver fork. Drain and cool, then wipe dry on a crash towel. Make a syrup of 1 qt. vinegar to 3 pts. sugar 2 t cloves, whole 4 T cinnamon bark Let come to a boil, drop in rinds and boil until clear. Allow the above quantity of syrup to a gallon of rinds. Place in a jar and cover with syrup. Will keep fine and do not need to be sealed.
A straightforward sweet-sour vinegar pickle, but the original assumes you know how to dress a rind and leaves storage to faith. The notes below cover both.
- Preparing the rinds"Prepare" means pare off all the green outer skin and trim away the pink flesh, leaving only the pale firm rind, then cut it into inch pieces or fingers. Any red left on will turn soft and cloud the syrup.
- A gallon of rindsMeasured by volume, not weight; the actual weight varies with how large the pieces are cut and how loosely they sit in the measure. The syrup quantity given is matched to that gallon, so scale both together.
- t and TRead as teaspoon and tablespoon, the usual sense in books of this kind. Four tablespoons of cinnamon bark means broken sticks measured loose, not ground cinnamon, which would turn the syrup muddy.
- Whole spicesTie the cloves and cinnamon in a square of cheesecloth. Loose cloves darken the rind in patches and are tedious to fish out of the jar.
- The silver fork testSilver was likely specified as a utensil that would not discolour the rind the way iron might; any fork will do. The point is tenderness, not time -- the rind should take the tine without resistance, which may take something like 20 to 30 minutes at a simmer.
- Crash towelCrash is a coarse open-weave linen. A flour-sack towel is the modern equivalent; the rinds must go into the syrup dry so the vinegar is not diluted.
- Boil until clearThis is the hinge. The rind turns from opaque white to translucent as the syrup penetrates; judge by look rather than by the clock. Pull the pot off before the syrup thickens to candy or the pieces will shrivel.
- StorageIgnore "do not need to be sealed." A crock of pickle under syrup on a cold pantry shelf behaved differently from a jar in a warm kitchen; unsealed, this will grow surface mould. Refrigerate the finished jars, or process them in a boiling-water bath following a current tested procedure for pickles.
- YieldDepends on how much of the syrup is packed with the pickle; the flavour is generally reckoned better after some weeks in the syrup than on the day it is made.
Watermelon rind pickle is thrift made ornamental: the part of the fruit that would otherwise be thrown out, turned into a sweet spiced relish to set beside cold meat. The method is old and widely distributed in American cookery, and it uses the same clove-and-cinnamon sweet pickling syrup applied to peaches, pears and crab apples. Its appearance here under a contributor's own name is typical of the compiled community cookbook, written for cooks who already knew what a crash towel was and needed only the proportions. That assumed knowledge is why the instructions are so brief, and why the storage advice, workable for an unheated pantry, no longer holds.