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Sweet Pickle Oe Melon

A preserved melon made by pickling in vinegar and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Melon and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 416 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sweet Pickle Oe Melon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare off the outer rind of ripe melons, remove seeds, and slice into ½ inch thick pieces.

  2. Soak the slices in good vinegar for 10 days.

Cook and flavor

  1. Cover the slices with cold fresh vinegar and simmer gently until tender.

  2. Drain the slices on a sieve and let them cool.

  3. Insert a clove into each slice and place them in a glass jar.

  4. Boil 10 ounces of sugar with 1 pint of water for 20 minutes to make a syrup.

  5. Cover the melon slices with the syrup and let them sit for about a week.

Pack

  1. Drain the syrup and pack the slices into jars, covering them with boiled and cooled vinegar.

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. Melon + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together416 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Melon + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together796 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Green melons
Provide the flesh that becomes tender and sweet-sour after pickling.
Good vinegar
Acidity that preserves the melon and gives the pickle its tang.
Sugar
Sweetness in the syrup that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Simmering until tender. Simmering in vinegar softens the melon flesh so it becomes tender. Heating too hard or too long can break the slices apart and make them mushy, so keep the heat gentle.

Swap the melon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Melonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar. 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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