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Citron Preserved
Carter.
Cut the citron in thin slices, boil in water with a small piece of alum until clear and tender, then rinse in cold water. Make a syrup of three-fourths pound of sugar to a pound of citron; boil a piece of ginger in the syrup; then pour the citron in and let it boil for a few minutes. Put in one lemon to five of the fruit,
A plain nineteenth-century sugar preserve, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what a kettle of preserves looked like. A few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- Which citronIn American community cookbooks of this period, "citron" often means citron melon (also called preserving melon), a hard, pale-fleshed relative of the watermelon grown specifically to be candied. The recipe works equally with the rind of true citron (Citrus medica), which is what the imported candied peel in fruitcake is made from, but the melon is the likelier thing in a Midwestern kitchen garden of the 1870s.
- The alumPotassium alum was the standard firming agent, used to keep melon flesh crisp through long boiling. Food-grade alum is still sold for pickling, but "a small piece" is unhelpfully vague; modern pickling practice uses no more than about a teaspoon per gallon of soaking water, and many cooks now skip it entirely and rely on the sugar to firm the fruit. Rinsing in cold water afterward, as directed, is not optional -- residual alum tastes metallic and astringent.
- Sugar ratioThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is roughly 1 2/3 cups sugar per pound. That is on the lean side for a keeping preserve; the syrup will stay loose and the result is closer to fruit in syrup than to candied peel.
- "One lemon to five of the fruit"Genuinely ambiguous in the original. Read most naturally it means one lemon to every five pounds of fruit, sliced thin and added with the citron. It is doing acid work as much as flavour work -- lemon juice helps invert the sugar and keeps the syrup from crystallising.
- The gingerA "piece of ginger" here most likely means dried root ginger, bruised and simmered in the syrup, then fished out. An inch or two of dried root, or a couple of inches of fresh ginger cut in coins, gives the same effect; ground ginger will cloud the syrup.
- Boiling until clearThis is the step that matters. The fruit must go translucent in the first water bath before it ever meets sugar -- opaque white flesh dropped into syrup will stay tough and leathery, because sugar sets the cell walls. Melon may need a good half-hour or more of simmering; citrus rind, less.
- "Boil for a few minutes"Too brief for a shelf-stable preserve. A modern cook would simmer the fruit in the syrup until the pieces are glassy and the syrup has thickened to a slow drip, which can take 20 minutes or more depending on how much water the fruit gave up.
- StorageThe recipe says nothing about jars or sealing, and no boiling-water-bath processing time can be inferred from it safely. Treat what you make as a refrigerator preserve, keep it covered in its syrup, and use it within a month, or follow a current tested canning procedure for sweet preserves.
The Home Cook Book originated as a Chicago charity cookbook, and a separate Canadian edition was credited to "the ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada"; the single-surname attribution at the head of this recipe -- "Carter" -- is the signature of the community cookbook form: each receipt credited to the woman who submitted it, the book sold to raise money for a local institution. Citron preserve earned its place in such books because citron melon was cheap, prolific, and nearly inedible any other way. The flesh is bland and hard, holds its shape through hours of cooking, and takes on whatever it is cooked with, which made it the household substitute for imported candied citron peel in mincemeat, fruitcake and holiday baking. Alum as a crisping agent for pickles and preserves runs through nineteenth-century American cookery and was still being defended and disputed in extension bulletins well into the twentieth century.