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Dessert

Watermelon-rind Preserves

Preserves made by boiling watermelon rinds with sugar, salt, alum, ginger water, and lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Watermelon-rind Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skin and scrape out the soft pulp from the watermelon rinds, then cut them into shapes.

  2. Soak the rinds in weak salt water for two days.

  3. Boil the rinds in weak alum water until tender.

  4. Drop the rinds in cold ginger water, then boil on the stove for one hour.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Make a syrup with 1½ pounds of sugar and 1 pound of melon, boiling until the rinds are transparent.

  2. Remove the rinds and place them in jars.

  3. Boil the syrup until it hangs in a drop on the end of a spoon, then pour it over the rinds.

  4. Flavor with Price’s extract of lemon just before removing from the stove.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Watermelon rinds
Form the bulk of the preserve and absorb the sweet syrup as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the rinds and thickens the syrup, helping preserve them and turn them clear.
Alum
Helps the rinds stay firm and crisp instead of turning soft during long cooking.
Price’s extract of lemon
Adds a bright citrus aroma that balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to the drop stage. Boiling drives off water until the sugar concentration is high enough to thicken the syrup and help preserve the rinds. Stopping early leaves a thin syrup that spoils more readily and does not coat the rinds well.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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