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Canned Watermelon
Cut rind of ripe melons (first cutting off all green parts) into small pieces two or three inches long, and boil until tender enough to pierce with fork; have a syrup made of white sugar, allowing half pound sugar to a pound fruit; skim out melon and place in syrup together with a few pieces of race ginger, let cook a few minutes, put in cans and seal hot.
This is a sweet watermelon-rind preserve packed by the old "seal it hot and trust it" method. The sugar syrup and the archaic terms are easy enough to read; the sealing instruction is the part that cannot be carried forward.
- Why the canning failsWatermelon rind is a low-acid food, and this recipe adds no vinegar, lemon or other acidifier. Sealed hot into jars with no boiling-water or pressure processing, a low-acid pack in an anaerobic jar is exactly the condition in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin, which no amount of chilling or visual inspection reveals.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereHalf a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is only about one part sugar to two of fruit by weight, and weaker still once the unspecified water in the syrup is counted. Jam and jelly keep because they finish near 65 percent soluble solids and low water activity; a light syrup like this one, cooked only "a few minutes," is nowhere close and will not hold on sugar alone.
- No process time is givenThe original names no jar temperature, no headspace and no processing time, so there is nothing to scale or convert. If you want to put up watermelon rind, follow a current tested recipe for pickled or preserved rind with a measured acid and a stated boiling-water process.
- Race ginger"race" is the old term for ginger in whole root form as opposed to ground, from French raiz, ultimately Latin radix, root. It was used of whole root, dried or fresh, rather than the powdered spice; a few coins of fresh root are a reasonable equivalent flavouring.
- Rind preparation"All green parts" means the entire dark outer skin, which stays tough and bitter no matter how long it cooks. Any pink flesh should go too, since it collapses to mush and clouds the syrup. What is wanted is the pale, firm layer between the two.
- Boiling until fork-tenderRind cut into two- or three-inch pieces takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes in plain water, depending on the melon's ripeness. The instruction to tenderise before it goes anywhere near sugar is sound: sugar syrup draws water out and firms the rind, so pieces that enter the syrup underdone stay leathery.
- YieldThe rind of one large melon yields something in the range of two to three pounds of trimmed pieces, which with sugar makes about three to four pints of finished preserve. Treat any batch you make from a modern tested recipe as a refrigerator preserve unless that recipe gives a processing time.
Watermelon-rind preserves belong to a wider nineteenth-century household habit of refusing to throw away anything with sugar-holding capacity: cucumber, citron melon, green tomato, quince core and rind of all kinds were candied, spiced or pickled. Southern cookbooks in particular carried rind recipes in quantity, and The Dixie Cook-Book places this one in a canning chapter that reflects the period's enthusiasm for the newly cheap glass jar with a screw or clamp lid. That enthusiasm ran well ahead of the science: the distinction between high-acid fruits, which are reasonably safe in a boiling-water bath, and low-acid foods, which require pressure processing, was not worked out and publicised until the twentieth century, so a nineteenth-century book will cheerfully tell you to "seal hot" for a rind, a bean and a peach alike. The ginger is the other period marker — whole race ginger was a standard pantry item for sweet preserves and gave this kind of pale, bland fruit the warmth it lacks on its own.