Pumpkin, Preserved
INGREDIENTS. To each lb. of pumpkin allow 1 lb. of roughly-pounded loaf sugar, 1 gill of lemon-juice.
Obtain a good sweet pumpkin; halve it, take out the seeds and pare off the rind; cut it into neat slices, or into pieces about the size of a five-shilling piece. Weigh the pumpkin, put the slices in a pan or deep dish in layers, with the sugar sprinkled between them; pour the lemonjuice over the top, and let the whole remain for 2 or 3 days. Boil altogether, adding 1/2 pint of water to every 3 lbs. of sugar used, until the pumpkin becomes tender; then turn the whole into a pan, where let it remain for a week; then drain off the syrup, boil it until it is quite thick: skim, and pour it, boiling, over the pumpkin. A little bruised ginger and lemon-rind, thinly pared, may be boiled in the syrup to flavour the pumpkin.
TIME. From to hour to boil the pumpkin tender.
SEASONABLE in September and October, but better when made in the latter month, as the pumpkin is then quite ripe.
Note.-Vegetable marrows are very good prepared in the same manner, but are not quite so rich.
A two-stage sugar preserve rather than a jam: the pumpkin is drawn with sugar and lemon, cooked gently, rested, then finished in a reduced syrup so the pieces stay whole and translucent. Most of what needs translating here is units and the squash itself.
- The hinge: keep the pieces intactThe long standing in sugar and the separate boiling-down of the syrup exist so the pumpkin firms and candies rather than collapsing. Stir as little as possible, lift the fruit with a slotted spoon, and stop cooking the moment a piece yields to a skewer.
- A gill of lemon-juiceBeeton's gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 140 ml, a little over half a US cup, per pound of pumpkin. That is the juice of roughly three to four lemons; the acid is what keeps a 1:1 sugar preserve from tasting merely sweet.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones, which is why it had to be pounded. Ordinary granulated sugar, weight for weight, is the direct substitute; preserving sugar dissolves a little more cleanly.
- The water and the pintHalf an imperial pint to every 3 lb of sugar is about 10 fl oz or 280 ml, not the 16 fl oz a US pint would give.
- A five-shilling pieceThe old crown, roughly 1.5 inches or 38 mm across. Cut slices about that wide and a little under half an inch thick.
- TimingThe time is incomplete as printed ('From to hour'), so the original figure is lost. Treat it as roughly half an hour to an hour of gentle simmering, which is about what tender pumpkin takes. Boiling hard will shred the slices.
- Choosing the pumpkinA carving pumpkin is watery and bland and will go to mush. A dense-fleshed winter squash - crown prince, kabocha, blue hubbard, or a small culinary pumpkin - is the closest modern stand-in for what Beeton calls 'a good sweet pumpkin'.
- Vegetable marrowAn overgrown summer squash (Cucurbita pepo), the same species as the modern courgette or zucchini, which is simply harvested immature. Choose a large, firm one and expect a less rich preserve, as the original says.
- Standing and storageThe two long rests happen at room temperature in a saturated sugar syrup, which is how Victorian larders worked. Cover the pan closely, keep it somewhere genuinely cool, and pot the finished preserve into hot sterilised jars; refrigerate once opened, or follow current water-bath guidance if you want it shelf-stable.
- YieldEach pound of pumpkin with its pound of sugar gives roughly 1.5 lb of preserve, about one and a half standard jam jars.
Pumpkins and their squash relatives came to Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and were long treated in English kitchens as a vegetable of the cottage garden - cheap, enormous and slightly suspect. Preserving them in sugar with lemon and ginger was a way of promoting them to the dessert table, borrowing the technique used for quinces, angelica and green walnuts, in which acid and a long sugar draw turn firm plant flesh into something jewel-like. The seasonal note is the practical heart of the entry: before refrigeration a preserve was how you kept an October glut into the winter, and the instruction to wait for the later month reflects the fact that a fully ripe pumpkin has more sugar and denser flesh. The closing remark about vegetable marrow points to the same logic applied to whatever the garden produced in excess - marrows were a Victorian obsession, grown to prize-winning size and then, inevitably, needing to be used up.