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Watermelon or Citron Preserves
10 lbs. melon rind. 10 lbs. sugar. 1 cup cinnamon bark. 1/4 lb. ginger root. 1/2 oz. alum. 1/2 cup salt. 7 quarts water.
Peel melon rind, cutting off green and pink, cut in any shape desired. Put into one gallon water, adding salt and alum, and let stand until brittle. Drain and put in vessel. Put on with enough water to cover, add ginger, cook until tender. Make sirup of sugar water and cinnamon. Drain the rind and add to the sirup with ginger. Cook until sirup is thick, from thirty minutes to one hour. Put in jars, let cool, cover with paraffin and seal.
A classic thrift preserve, but the sealing method and the low-acid fruit put it outside current home-canning practice. The notes below explain the recipe's terms and where it fails.
- Why it fails: the paraffin sealPouring melted paraffin over the surface and calling it sealed was standard in this period and has been off the table for decades. Wax shrinks and cracks as it cools, pulls away from the glass, and leaves channels for mold and yeast; the filled jars get no processing at all, so nothing in the jar has been made reliably shelf-stable.
- Why it fails: low-acid fruitWatermelon rind is a low-acid vegetable-like fruit, roughly pH 5 to 6. Heavy syrup lowers water activity but does not acidify, and this recipe gives no lemon juice, no vinegar, no processing time and no temperature. A current tested recipe with a measured acid addition and a boiling-water process should be used instead.
- The alumHalf an ounce of alum in a gallon of brine is the old crisping trick; the aluminium salt is held to firm the pectin in the rind so it stays translucent and chewy rather than collapsing. Food-grade alum still exists in the pickling aisle, but modern recipes generally get the same firmness from a long soak in plain salt brine or a calcium chloride product.
- "Until brittle"The brine soak is judged by feel, not clock: the rind is meant to go firm and snap rather than bend. The recipe gives no time or temperature, and comparable instructions of the period generally assume a soak of some hours in a cool place.
- The water is ambiguousSeven quarts is the total for the whole operation, of which one gallon is the brine. The rest is split between the cooking water and the syrup with no division given, so the syrup's concentration is genuinely unspecified in the original.
- Cinnamon and ginger"1 cup cinnamon bark" is a volume of whole quills, not ground spice, which would be an enormous amount of powder. A quarter pound of ginger root likewise means whole root -- fresh or the dried whole root then sold for pickling -- rather than the ground spice.
- QuantityTen pounds of trimmed rind means several large watermelons once the green skin and all pink flesh are cut away, and equal-weight sugar makes this a full-day preserving job producing a large batch; the recipe states no yield.
Watermelon rind preserves belong to the older logic of the kitchen in which nothing edible left the house as waste: the sweet flesh was eaten fresh and the thick white rind, useless raw, was brined, spiced and candied into a preserve for winter. The title's alternative points to a distinct plant, the citron or preserving melon (Citrullus lanatus var. citroides), a hard, pale-fleshed relative grown specifically because it will not fall apart in syrup; it was a common garden crop in the nineteenth century and is still sold by seed merchants today. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers just after the First World War, when she had worked as a food conservation lecturer during the war years, and the preserves chapter of this book carries that stamp throughout: home fruit was abundant, and using the rind as well as the heart of the melon was simply good housekeeping. The alum soak and the paraffin cap were both ordinary in that period, and both are the parts of the method that have since been retired.