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Preserved Citron
4 pounds sugar 4 cups water Wash citron, cut in halves, remove seeds; cut each half into eighths, cover with salt, then with water; let stand over night, then drain. Cover with cold water, let stand over night. Drain, remove skin, and cook in syrup of sugar and water until citron is tender. Remove each piece carefully to a platter. When cool, fill jars with citron, and then with boiling syrup. Seal.
If the citron lacks flavor, the juice and rind of four lemons and a small piece of ginger root may be boiled with the syrup.
If the citron is placed in the jars while it is hot, the pieces will not keep their shape. 4 pounds peaches
This is an open-kettle preserve of the sort standard in American cookbooks a century ago, and the sealing method is the part that has not survived modern food-safety practice. The notes below explain the ingredient and the process; a current, tested preserving recipe should be used instead.
- The citron is not the citrusPreserving citron here is citron melon (also called preserving melon or stock melon), a hard, pale-fleshed watermelon relative grown specifically to be candied. It is nearly flavorless raw, which is why the recipe offers lemon and ginger as a correction. It is not the thick-rinded citron fruit sold as candied peel, and it is rarely found outside farm markets and seed catalogs today.
- Why it fails: open-kettle sealingHot syrup poured into jars and capped, with no boiling-water bath afterward, was standard practice in American preserving chapters of this period. It seals by vacuum as the jar cools, but the contents are not held at a temperature that reliably destroys spoilage organisms after sealing -- here the citron is deliberately cooled on a platter first -- and the seal itself is unreliable. This step is the reason the recipe should not be reproduced.
- Why it fails: a low-acid fruitCitron melon is low in acid, and the lemon here is optional, offered for flavor rather than for pH. A low-acid food in a sealed, oxygen-free jar that has not been processed is the condition Clostridium botulinum requires. The heavy syrup lowers water activity but is not a guarantee, and the recipe measures neither acidity nor sugar concentration relative to the fruit.
- No quantity of citronThe ingredient line gives sugar and water but never says how much fruit the syrup is meant to cover, so there is no way to judge the sugar-to-fruit ratio that would determine whether the preserve is shelf-stable at all.
- The salt and water soaksThe overnight salting draws water out of the flesh and firms it; the second soak in plain cold water pulls the salt back out. Both are texture steps, not preservation steps, and they contribute nothing to the safety of the finished jar.
- The one line worth keepingThe closing instruction is sound observation: hot citron slumps and loses its edges when packed. Cooling the pieces on a platter before packing is why old preserves held their shape, and the principle applies to any candied fruit.
Citron melon was a kitchen-garden crop grown for one purpose: to be turned into a firm, translucent sweetmeat that stood in for imported candied citrus peel in fruitcakes, mincemeat and puddings. Cheap sugar and a long-keeping melon made it a thrifty substitute, and American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward carried versions of this recipe with variations of lemon, ginger and sometimes alum for crispness. Its appearance in a Lowney's book is typical of the period's preserving chapters, which assumed a household would put up a winter's worth of fruit in glass in late summer. The crop faded from home gardens as commercially candied peel became reliably cheap, and the word "citron" on a modern fruitcake label now almost always means the citrus.