Melange
A combination of fruits and their delightful commingling of flavors, results in a truly delicious conserve. It is easily made, requires no cooking; keeps for years, and can be served with the meat course, and with ice cream.
Begin in June with strawberries, the first fruit of the season, adding of each successive kind as they appear in market, using only the choicest of each. Procure a perfectly new three-gallon stone jar. Stem clean and weigh two pounds of large, fresh and ripe strawberries, weigh an equal quantity of best granulated sugar and place all together in the stone jar. Cover with one pint of pure brandy. Cover the jar with a cloth, tie up securely and place in the cellar or in a cool place. Look after it for several mornings, stirring well the mixture with a wooden spoon until the sugar is all dissolved. Next add a pineapple prepared in small pieces, with a silver fork. Add the weight of the pineapple in sugar and thus continue with each successive fruit, not forgetting to stir each morning for several consecutive days after adding the fruit, to more thoroughly dissolve the sugar. The stirring must be done carefully so as not to mash the fruit. Cherries, black, red and white can be added, but must first be pitted. Raspberries give an especially delightful fragrance, and three pints are not too many for this quantity. Get as solid ones as possible and the red, black and yellow can all be used to give variety in color. When the jar is about one-third filled, diminish the quantity of sugar, and use from then on, only three-quarters of a pound of sugar to each pound of fruit. Apricots should be pared, seeded and halved, and peaches must be prepared in the same way. Pears should be pared, quartered and cored. Grapes, malagas excepted, are too full of seeds to be desirable. Plums of all kinds, green, purple and red, give variety in coloring and add much to the flavor. In fact, plums and peaches are especially desirable, as too large a preponderance of the smaller fruits detract from the appearance. Plums must be stoned and the larger varieties can be halved. In the fall, after the jar is filled, let all stand together for several weeks. Then fill into glass jars, adding as much liquid as desirable with the fruit, and seal without heating. There will be quite a little surplus juice, which can be canned by itself and labeled and utilized in various ways. Boiled down to a jelly-like consistency, is nice with bread and butter as a sweet sandwich.
This is a rumtopf by another name: a running crock of fruit layered with sugar and spirit through the summer, drawn on in winter. Nothing is cooked, so the preservation depends entirely on keeping enough sugar and alcohol around the fruit.
- The hinge: keep the fruit submerged in spiritOne pint of brandy is enough for the first two pounds of strawberries, but not for the twenty-odd pounds of fruit that follow. Traditional rumtopf practice is to add spirit with every layer so the fruit stays covered; without that, the upper fruit sits exposed and molds or ferments. Add brandy as you add fruit and press the fruit down under the liquid each time.
- VesselA three-gallon stone jar is a 12-quart crock. Use a modern food-safe stoneware crock or a glass vessel; antique glazes are not reliably lead-free, and this mixture sits acidic and alcoholic for months. The recipe's cloth cover, tied securely, is not an airtight seal, which will let any gas that does form escape.
- Sugar ratiosEqual weight sugar to fruit at the start, dropping to three-quarters of a pound per pound once the jar is a third full. That is a genuinely high-sugar preserve and the sugar is doing preservative work, not just sweetening. Reducing it substantially undermines the whole method.
- Storage temperature"Cellar or a cool place" means an unheated, dark space, cooler than a modern living room. A modern heated basement is too warm; a refrigerator or an unheated garage in mild weather is closer. Warmth pushes the crock into active fermentation rather than slow maceration.
- "Seal without heating"This is a cold pack with no processing, and it is not shelf-stable canning by any current standard. Fill clean jars, refrigerate them, and expect slow continued fermentation — leave headspace and loosen the lids periodically rather than sealing tight. Discard any jar that smells of solvent or acetone, or shows fuzzy mold.
- Silver fork, wooden spoonReactive metal was likely the concern behind the silver fork: carbon-steel blades and spoons discolor acidic fruit and can taint the flavor, and silver and wood were the period's less reactive options. Stainless steel is fine now, but keep the light hand — the recipe's stated reason for careful stirring is not to mash the fruit.
- MalagasMalaga was a name used in the period for large, firm table grapes. Any large firm table grape works; the author's stated objection to the rest was the seeds.
- Yield and servingA full crock yields roughly 12 quarts of fruit and syrup — a great deal, and it was meant to be. Serve a spoonful with roast meat or over ice cream, as the headnote says, in small quantity: this is closer to a boozy condiment than a jam.
Melange is simply French for mixture, and the dish is close kin to the German Rumtopf — a crock started with the first strawberries and fed through the season, opened around Christmas. American cookbooks of the 1880s through the 1910s carried it as "tutti-frutti" or "brandied fruits," usually with brandy in place of rum, and the instruction to begin in June and finish in the fall is the whole logic of it: a cook could bank a summer's fruit in sugar and spirit with no fire, no jars and no processing time. The insistence on a perfectly new stone jar is worth noting, given how long a batch like this had to keep. That the conserve was thought fit for the meat course as well as for ice cream places it in the same category as the sweet-sharp relishes and spiced fruits that crowded the preserves chapters of turn-of-the-century American books.