Pickled Cantaloupe Recipe from 1913

This is from the amazing Ultra Select Dishes for Afternoon Teas (1913) (see all recipes from this book here). It’s a collection of recipes from chefs at high end hotel restaurants, and honestly it’s a crazy collection because all the recipes are meant for huge groups of customers, so the proportions are for, like, 20+ people at a time and not individual families like most other cookbooks. They’re also very high-brow recipes, quite different from the usual family cookbooks from the same time period.

I’ll be sharing quite a few of these recipes because I think they’re kooky and fun, but I’ll try to stick to ones that people would actually want to eat nowadays (so no aspic, nor weird seafood bakes).

This first recipe is for pickled cantaloupes (spelled canteloupes back then), which I picked because it’s an interesting flavor idea.

Original Recipe Text

From chef G.R. Meyere at Rector’s, Chicago, Illinois!

Take two dozen ripe but firm canteloupes, cut into quarters, remove seeds and peel them. Take a sauce pan and put three pounds of sugar in it with three quarts of good vinegar. Tie in a cloth a dozen cloves, two dozen whole peppers and five or six bay leaves and place in the vinegar; add about two or three sticks of cinnamon and cook for a few minutes, then add the canteloupes, let them cook, testing often and remove them with a skimmer while they are very firm, place in a stone jar. Set the liquid to boil for about five minutes longer then pour it over the contents in jar, placing a plate just over the canteloupes so as to keep them under the liquid. The liquid should be drawn off once a week for three or four weeks, heated to boiling point, cooled and poured over the canteloupes again. The cantaloupes will keep for months in a cool place. Cut in any size desired and serve in a small relish dish with some of the liquid over it. Serve individually very cold

Updated Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 dozen cantaloupes, ripe but firm (see Recipe Notes below for adjusting this down to 3-5 melons)
• 3 pounds sugar
• 3 quarts good vinegar
• 12 cloves
• 2 dozen whole peppers
• 5 bay leaves
• 2 sticks of cinnamon

Instructions

1. Prep Your Cantaloupes

Start by quartering your cantaloupes. The flesh should be that perfect peachy-orange color and fairly firm.

Remove all the seeds (save them if you like– they can be roasted for a crunchy snack!), and carefully peel away the rind.

Pro tip: if your cantaloupe isn’t perfectly ripe, let it sit on the counter for a day or two until it’s fragrant but still feels firm when gently pressed.

2. Create Your Pickling Liquid

In a large saucepan (enamel or stainless steel works best), combine your vinegar and sugar.

Now here’s a lovely old-fashioned touch: we’re going to make a spice sachet!

Take a piece of cheesecloth or a large tea ball if you have one, and fill it with the cloves, peppercorns, and bay leaves. This makes it much easier to remove them later.

Add this along with your cinnamon sticks to the vinegar mixture.

3. The Pickling Process

Bring your spiced vinegar to a gentle simmer. Your kitchen will smell amazing!

Add your cantaloupe pieces and cook them just until they start to become translucent but are still firm. This is crucial– you want them to hold their shape. I usually test a piece after about 5 minutes by gently poking it with a fork.

4. The Preservation Stage

Here’s where we get to the real preservation magic. Using a slotted spoon or skimmer, carefully transfer your cantaloupe pieces to clean jars.

While traditional recipes call for a stone jar, any large glass jar with a tight-fitting lid will work perfectly. The trick here is placing a small plate or weight on top of the fruit to keep it submerged in the pickling liquid so you get even preservation.

5. The Maintenance Phase

This is where patience comes in! For the next 3-4 weeks, you’ll need to reheat the pickling liquid weekly.

Simply pour it off, bring it to a boil, let it cool slightly, and pour it back over the fruit.

Think of it as giving your pickles a weekly spa treatment! This process helps develop the flavors and ensures proper preservation.

Recipe Notes

The Chef

Each section has a little bio for the chef or staff member who contributed the recipes, including a photo! Here’s the one for the chef for this recipe, G. R. Meyer. His bio is super sparse and actually doesn’t say that much about him, so I tried doing some research.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t one of those historical chefs that had dozens of books written about him (or his food), so all I was able to find were his contributions to the the other cookbooks in this series. Oh well!

Portion Size

If you’re not prepared to process 24 cantaloupes and pickle them in a giant jar, I think adjusting this recipes down to, say, 3-5 cantaloupes is a good idea. The effort it takes to make this dish means it’s worth forking over the time and effort for more than a few melons, in my opinion, but not DOZENS of them.

I had to guess a bit at how many servings the original recipe was for; since it’s served on a small relish dish I guessed you’d get maybe 10 servings per cantaloupe, so that’s 240 servings for the whole recipe. (If it’s a side dish then maybe less, if it’s a dessert topping then maybe more. Whatver, I’m going with 240 servings.)

I reduced it down to 30 servings, which I calculate to be 3 cantaloupes (hopefully), which means reducing all the other ingredients by 8.

That brings the ingredients down to this:

• 3 cantaloupes ripe but firm
• 6 oz sugar (equivalent to 2/3 cup raw or 7/8 cup granulated)
• 12 fl.oz good vinegar
• 1½ cloves
• ¼ dozen whole peppers
• ¾ bay leaves
• ¼ stick cinnamon

I used BakingCalculator.com to do the conversions but I’m not 100% convinced it’s correct. It DOES look a lot more manageable, at least.

A Cool Place

For food safety, I recommend storing these in the refrigerator rather than just “a cool place” as the original recipe suggests.