Skip to main content
Dessert

Water-melon Sweet Pickle

A sweet pickle made from watermelon rinds preserved in sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Water-melon Sweet Pickle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Soak the rinds of 2 large watermelons in weak salt water overnight.

  2. Rinse the rinds and scald them until tender in a weak tea of alum and peach-tree leaves.

  3. Rinse again in pure water.

Cook the pickle

  1. In a preserving kettle, combine 34 pounds of sugar and 3 pints of vinegar.

  2. Add the prepared rinds and season with mace, cinnamon, white mustard seed, and ginger.

  3. Cook very slowly for a long time until the fruit is clear.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Mustard + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 pickle and turn tender and clear when slowly cooked in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the pickle and, in a thick syrup, helps preserve the rinds.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the pickle.
White mustard seed
Contributes a sharp, pungent flavour to the spiced syrup.

The step that matters

Cook very slowly until the fruit is clear. Slow cooking in sugar syrup gradually draws sugar into the rinds, making them translucent and firm rather than tough or collapsed. Cooking too hard can break the rinds apart or toughen them.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, mustard, 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

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes