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Cantelope Rind Preserves

Preserves made from cantaloupe or watermelon rinds boiled and sweetened with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cantelope Rind Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Keep the rinds in strong brine until ready to preserve.

  2. Boil the rinds in fresh water until the salt is removed.

  3. Soak or boil briefly in weak alum water.

  4. Boil again in fresh water until the alum taste is gone.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup with 2 pounds of sugar and enough water to dissolve it.

  2. Boil the syrup until clarified.

  3. Add the rinds to the syrup.

  4. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  5. Add lemon flavoring and citric acid if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cantaloupe or watermelon rinds
Form the bulk of the preserve, becoming tender and translucent as they cook in syrup.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at this concentration, helps preserve the rinds and give them a glossy texture.

The step that matters

Removing the alum taste. Alum firms the rind so it stays crisp, but leftover alum tastes bitter. Boiling again in fresh water until the taste is gone rinses it out before the rinds go into the syrup.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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