Home › Vegetables › Preserves
Preserves
Wash the outside of the pumpkin clean; then cut it into pieces about 3 inches square, and place in a preserving kettle of about 1 gallon capacity, with 1 cup water and 1½ to 2 cups honey.
Cook slowly until the water and honey become a thick syrup, and the pumpkin well done and candied.
A one-pot candied pumpkin, closer to a Latin American dulce de calabaza than to a modern jam. The whole thing turns on very low heat and patience: honey scorches long before sugar syrup does.
- The hinge: gentle heatHoney darkens and turns bitter well before a sugar syrup would, and there is only a cup of water standing between it and the pan bottom. Keep the burner low, use a heavy pan, and stir the pieces gently once the liquid begins to thicken.
- Prepare the pumpkin properlyThe instruction to wash the outside assumes you know to halve it, scrape out seeds and stringy fibre, and leave the skin on — the rind holds the squares together through the long cook. Use a dense cooking pumpkin, kabocha or butternut; a jack-o'-lantern type is watery and will collapse.
- Quantities and yieldThe gallon kettle sets the batch size: enough cut pumpkin to fit it, which is what 1½ to 2 cups of honey will coat. Yield will depend on how far the pumpkin cooks down.
- TimingNo time is given. Expect 45 minutes to 1½ hours: the pieces should be translucent at the edges and tender to a skewer, with the liquid reduced to a syrup that sheets slowly off a spoon.
- Water is optional in practicePumpkin adds its own liquid -- Pumpkin gives up a good deal of liquid as it cooks. If the pan looks wet at the halfway point, finish uncovered so the syrup can reduce rather than boiling the pieces to mush.
- This is not a canning recipeDespite the chapter heading, there is no sterilising, sealing or processing step here, and the sugar concentration is not measured. Treat it as a fresh confection: refrigerate in its syrup and eat within two weeks, or freeze.
- ServingGood at room temperature with the syrup spooned over, and cream or fresh cheese alongside. The syrup itself is worth keeping for pancakes or yoghurt.
Candying hard-fleshed squash in honey or raw sugar is a long-standing way of keeping a pumpkin past its season, and versions survive across the Americas and the Mediterranean — Mexican calabaza en tacha, cooked with piloncillo and eaten at Day of the Dead, is the best-known relative. The recipe's placement under Preserves reflects the period's looser use of the word, which could cover anything cooked down in sweetener, sealed or not, rather than the narrower canning sense that took hold as home boiling-water and pressure processing became standardised.