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Watermelon Rind Preserves (Carefully trim away the green)
Carefully trim away the green outer rind and any portion of the pink center which adheres. Cut the rind in very small pieces, wash, cover with water and boil for 20 minutes. Drain and discard the water. Again cover with water and boil for 20 minutes. Drain and discard the second boiling water.
Place 3 cupfuls of water in a preserving kettle. Add 1 package of Pexel slowly, while constantly stirring. Add 1 level teaspoonful ground cinnamon, and other spices to suit the individual taste. Add the juice and grated rind of one lemon. Then add 4½ tightly packed cupfuls of drained watermelon rind. Heat just to boiling and add 7 level cupfuls of sugar. Heat to boiling and boil for 25 minutes. Remove from the fire, let stand 5 minutes, stir and pour into containers and seal hot.
A straightforward high-sugar preserve, complicated by one discontinued commercial ingredient and one boiling time that modern pectin will not survive. Read the notes on Pexel and on the 25 minutes before you start.
- Trim to white onlyThe dish depends on using nothing but the firm white layer. Any green skin left on stays tough and bitter, and pink flesh left on collapses into mush and clouds the syrup.
- PexelPexel appears to have been a brand of powdered fruit pectin sold in packages sized for one batch; the recipe's instruction to stir it slowly into water is consistent with a powder rather than a liquid. A standard 1.75 oz box of powdered pectin is the usual substitute; liquid pectin, which is added at a different stage, is not interchangeable here.
- The 25-minute boilPowdered pectin sets after roughly one minute at a full boil and breaks down with prolonged cooking. Boiled 25 minutes, the pectin contributes almost nothing and the set comes from sugar concentration alone, expect a thick syrup around translucent rind rather than a jelly. If you want the pectin to work, it has to go in near the end, not the beginning.
- Watermelon choiceField melons of the period generally had thicker rinds than modern thin-rinded and seedless varieties, which give very little usable white layer. Buy the largest, heaviest-skinned melon you can find; depending on the melon you may need more than one to reach 4½ packed cups.
- The two boilingsBoth 20-minute boils are there to soften the rind and leach out raw vegetal flavor. Drain thoroughly after the second, or the extra water will thin the syrup and stretch the cooking time.
- SpicesBeyond the teaspoon of cinnamon, the usual period additions are a few whole cloves, a piece of stick cinnamon, or sliced fresh ginger, tied in cheesecloth so they can be lifted out.
- Sealing"Pour into containers and seal hot" is open-kettle canning, which current practice has abandoned. Fill hot sterilized half-pint jars to ¼ inch of the top and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude.
Watermelon rind preserves belong to a long tradition of thrift preserving, in which the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the compost or the pig is candied in heavy syrup and spiced. Recipes for them appear in American household books through the nineteenth century, and the dish is particularly associated with the South, where melons were grown in quantity and the rind was too plentiful to waste. What dates this version is the packaged pectin: commercial liquid pectin reached home kitchens in the 1910s, with powdered pectin following in the 1930s, and church and community cookbooks of the following decades are full of recipes written around a named brand and its single-batch package. If the recipe sits in a pickles and relishes chapter rather than with the jams, that would reflect how these sweet, spiced, vinegar-free preserves were eaten: as a condiment alongside meat, not as a spread.