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Pickled Watermelon Rind
Pare and cut into thick slices, the rind of a good-sized watermelon. Boil one ounce of alum in a gallon of water and pour over the sliced melon, letting it stand on the back of the stove for a half day. Remove from the alum water and let it lie in cold water until cold; drain. Have ready a quart of vinegar, three pounds of brown sugar, an ounce of stick cinnamon and half an ounce of cloves. Boil sugar and vinegar; strain; add the spices and rind, and boil until the rind is soft.
A standard sweet-spiced rind pickle of the period, with one step — the alum soak — that modern canning authorities have abandoned. The rest translates directly.
- The alum soakAlum (potassium aluminum sulfate) was the standard crisping agent before firm-textured pickles were understood as a function of fresh produce and gentle cooking. It is still sold food-grade in the spice aisle, but current canning guidance drops it entirely: soaking the rind overnight in plain cold water, or a brine of 1/4 cup pickling salt per quart, firms it adequately. If you do use alum, rinse thoroughly as the recipe directs — residues taste metallic and astringent.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range this meant the coolest part of the top: hot but well below a simmer. On a modern stove, hold it barely steaming over the lowest heat, or simply let it stand covered in a warm kitchen for the half day.
- Weights and volumesOne ounce of alum is about 2 tablespoons; half an ounce of cloves is about 2 tablespoons whole. An ounce of stick cinnamon is more like eight 3-inch sticks than three or four, depending on their thickness. A gallon is 16 cups, a quart 4 cups. Three pounds of brown sugar is roughly 6 3/4 cups packed.
- Choosing the melonA "good-sized watermelon" of the period would have been a thick-rinded field melon with an inch or more of white flesh under the green skin. Modern seedless melons have very little rind; look for an old-fashioned or heirloom variety, and pare away all green skin and every trace of pink, which turns to mush.
- Prep detail the recipe skips"Thick slices" is left undefined; pieces of about an inch are a reasonable reading. Cut them uniformly — mixed sizes give you some pieces still hard and others collapsed at the same moment.
- Bag the spicesLoose cloves and cinnamon shards in the finished jar keep extracting and eventually turn the syrup bitter and dark. Tie them in cheesecloth and lift them out when the rind is done.
- "Boil until the rind is soft"Translucent is the marker, not soft: 45 minutes to over an hour of gentle simmering, until the pieces go glassy and a skewer meets slight resistance. Pushed past that, the rind falls apart in the syrup.
- Yield and keepingThe rind of one large melon makes roughly 4 to 6 pints. The recipe gives no processing or storage instructions; pack it in the refrigerator and use within a couple of months, or follow a current tested procedure if you want shelf-stable jars.
Watermelon rind pickle belongs to the thrift end of the preserving year — the part of the fruit that would otherwise go to the pigs, turned into something to set beside cold meat in February. It appears in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century and is most strongly associated with the South, though northern and Pennsylvania German households made it too, often alongside pickled peaches and spiced pears in the same sweet-vinegar-and-clove idiom. Alum's presence here dates the recipe as much as the wording does: it was recommended in print for crisp pickles well into the twentieth century, and its gradual disappearance from home canning instructions is one of the clearest markers of the shift from household tradition to tested, laboratory-backed guidance.