Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserving Watermelon with the Pulp

Preserved watermelon pulp boiled, sweetened with sugar, and flavored with lemon and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and ginger 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 ↓

Preserving Watermelon with the Pulp

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the watermelon

  1. Soak the watermelon in a brine solution for 3 days.

  2. Soak the watermelon in fresh water for another 3 days.

  3. Boil the watermelon in alum-water until it reaches a boil, repeating this several times.

  4. After boiling, let the watermelon sit in fresh water for a few hours.

Make the preserves

  1. For every pound of watermelon, add 1 pound of white sugar and enough water to create syrup.

  2. For every 6 pounds of preserves, add 2 peeled, sliced, and seeded lemons.

  3. Flavor with ginger and other spices.

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. Lemon + gingertop 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
Forms the bulk of the preserves and provides the pieces that hold their texture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the watermelon during the brine soak, firming its flesh.
Alum
Helps the watermelon rind stay firm and crisp through repeated boiling.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, as a syrup, preserves the fruit by drawing out moisture.
2 lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup.
Ginger
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the preserves.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in alum-water. Alum is used to firm the fruit's cell structure so it does not turn soft during long cooking. Boiling too long or too hard can still break down the flesh, so the watermelon should be brought to a boil and then removed as the record describes, then rinsed before the syrup is added.

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes