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Sweet Pickled Watermelon
4 tablespoons cinnamon sticks 4 tablespoons cloves (whole) watermelon Cut skin from watermelon; cut rind into small pieces about two inches square; cover with water and cook until tender. Boil sugar and vinegar ten minutes; add spices tied in a bag, simmer until syrupy, about two hours; add melon and simmer one hour. Fill jars and seal.
This is a canning recipe with the two ingredients that determine its safety left out entirely. The problems are structural rather than a matter of updating technique.
- No vinegar or sugar quantityThe instruction "boil sugar and vinegar ten minutes" appears with no amounts, and neither is listed in the ingredients. In a pickle held at room temperature, the vinegar-to-produce ratio is what keeps the pH low enough to block Clostridium botulinum; guessing at it is exactly the variable that cannot be guessed at.
- Vinegar strength is not given eitherEarly twentieth-century household vinegar varied widely in acetic acid content and was often home-made cider vinegar of unknown strength. Modern canning recipes specify 5 percent acidity for this reason. Nothing here pins that down.
- "Fill jars and seal" is not a processNo boiling-water bath, no processing time, no headspace. Sealing hot jars and letting them cool (open-kettle canning) was common household practice in books of this period; it does not meet any current standard for shelf-stable canning.
- Watermelon rind is a low-acid vegetableThe white rind behaves like a squash, not like a fruit. All of its acidity comes from the added vinegar, which is the ingredient this recipe declines to measure.
- The spice quantities are the only firm numbersFour tablespoons each of stick cinnamon and whole cloves, tied in a bag, is heavy spicing, and the ingredient list calls for a whole watermelon, so this is clearly a large batch. That scale makes the missing acid figure more consequential, not less.
- If you want watermelon rind pickleUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation extension service, which will state the vinegar strength, the ratio and the processing time. This page is worth reading as a document, not as instructions.
Sweet pickled watermelon rind is a thrift dish often traced to the American South and said to have spread north through nineteenth-century cookbooks: the flesh was eaten in season, and the thick white inner rind, otherwise waste, was blanched tender and candied in a spiced vinegar syrup to be eaten with cold meat in winter. The cinnamon-and-clove syrup here is the standard sweet-pickle treatment applied across the period to peaches, pears, crabapples and cantaloupe alike, and the spice bag keeps the syrup clear and allows the whole spices to be lifted out. Its appearance in Lowney's, a book published by a chocolate manufacturer and stocked with confectionery, is a reminder that these company cookbooks aimed to be complete household manuals rather than single-subject collections — and the vanished sugar and vinegar amounts show how much such books still assumed a cook already knew.