Watermelon Rind Pickles, Grandma Hay's

One of the great thrift foods, and I mean that as praise. You eat the watermelon and you are left with the part everybody throws away — and the pale dense layer between the red flesh and the green skin turns out to be a superb pickling vegetable. My reconstruction of hers.

Ingredients

• 8 cups peeled watermelon rind, cut in 2x1 inch pieces

SALT SOAK

• 6 cups water
• 1 cup pickling salt

SYRUP

• 4 cups sugar
• 2 cups cider vinegar (5% acidity)
• 6 cinnamon sticks (3 inch)
• 1 teaspoon whole cloves
• 1 teaspoon whole allspice berries
• 1 lemon, sliced thin (optional)

Directions

Key ingredients

Cinnamon

1. Step 1 - Prepare the rind, and take this seriously. Peel off all the green skin and scrape off all the red flesh. Only the white-to-pale-green layer goes in the jar. Any red left on turns to mush and clouds the syrup, and it is the single most common way this recipe goes wrong. Cut into 2x1 inch pieces.
2. Step 2 - Salt soak, which is not optional. Dissolve the salt in the water, pour it over the rind, and refrigerate several hours or overnight. This firms the rind before it ever meets the syrup. Rinse thoroughly and drain well afterwards — twice, in fresh cold water.
3. Step 3 - Parboil until just tender. Cover the drained rind in fresh water and simmer until a piece takes a fork with slight resistance, about 10 minutes. Do not cook it soft here; the syrup stage is still to come.
4. Step 4 - Make the syrup. In a Dutch oven bring the sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, allspice and lemon to a boil.
5. Step 5 - Hot pack. Add the drained rind, return to a boil, then reduce and simmer 10 minutes uncovered until the pieces turn translucent. That translucency is the doneness signal — watch for it rather than the clock.
6. Step 6 - Jar and process. Pack hot into sterilised pint jars with a cinnamon stick in each, ladle syrup over leaving 1/2 inch headspace, remove bubbles, wipe rims, seat lids, and water-bath process 10 minutes.
7. Rest a month before eating, same as the peaches.

Notes

Also a reconstruction. Same as Peaches, Pickled, Grandma Hay’s — she never wrote it down, I canned it with her, and this is my best rebuild of somebody else’s cooking forty-some years on. If you have a version from your own family, yours is probably not the same, and that is rather the point of a food that was never standardised.

Why I love this one. It is fiddly, it uses an ingredient most people put in the bin, and it makes something better than anything you can buy. Of all the food in this part of the collection it is the one I would most like to see come back.

The lemon is mine, not hers, hence optional. It brightens a very sweet syrup.

Watch out for: leaving red flesh on the rind (mush and cloudy syrup); skipping the salt soak (soft pickles); overcooking at the parboil stage (you get two chances to overcook it and only need one).

The translucency. When the rind goes from opaque white to glassy and translucent, it is done. This is a much better signal than any timer, because rind thickness varies enormously between melons.