Watermelon Rind Pickles

I once took my dad to Pioneer Farms in Austin. We stood on front of a 19th century settlers cabin. It had one room, a dirt floor, fireplace, cedar post walls chinked with mud. A few implements hung from the walls -- a coiled rope, an ax, metal things I could not identify. There was a table, two short split wood benches, and a bed smaller than my five year old's twin bed.

My dad said, "I grew up in cabins a lot like that, you know."

I looked at him in astonishment. He had 6 brothers and sisters. I tried to picture them all lving in that one room.

"It wasn't that nice of course."

Ba-Doom-Doom!

That was the thing about my dad. His childhood in rural Louisiana was so unbelievably hard-scrabble that his stories often sounded like the lead-in to a joke. But though he was never self-pitying, he wasn't joking either. His childhood was one of almost unremitting hunger, punctuated by fits of violence from his angry, alcoholic father.

He didn't have electricity until he was fifteen. He never saw a dentist until he join the Air Force. A rural nurse visited twice a year to give the kids in his family deworming treatments.

His parents were truck croppers, something hardly anyone I've told this story to has ever heard of. It was, believe it or not, a step below share croppers.

"Share croppers had a better deal than we did," said my dad.

Ba-Doom-Doom!

Truck croppers worked a farmer's field in return for a portion of the harvest. They loaded their portion into their trucks and sold it at small markets. Then they moved on. I once saw a list made by my dad's sister of all the places they had lived - three or five or eight in one year. It's no wonder that my dad worked so hard to hang on to our little dirt farm in the Texas Hill Country. After his childhood, he was determined to never move again.

In addition to working the farmer's field, my grandmother planted a kitchen garden wherever they lived and usually just managed a harvest a single crop before they had to move on. Dad told me she always canned furiously, trying to preserve every last little thing before they had to leave a house.  After she was finished canning the good stuff, whole figs, tomatoes, blackberry jam, she liked to pickle and make jellies of scraps of this and that. Her specialties included corncob and peach peel jelly and watermelon rind pickles, The family survived mostly on boiled greens and cornbread with dripping, so this monotonous diet was enlivened by my grandmother's pickles and jellies.

Every once in a while, I like to make a batch of watermelon rind pickles and think of my grandmother, loading and unloading her few small possessions into the family truck, she and my grandfather and all six children. I don't know what they owned. Maybe a bed or two, a table, a few chairs, a dresser, a box of mementos, some bundles of clothing. I imagine her packing her jars of preserves carefully, wedging them between the clothes, maybe. And I imagine her hoping the jars arrive unbroken to the next house where she will plant her next garden.

My recipe for watermelon pickles is pretty standard, gleaned from the 1972 Frederickburg Community Cookbook that I for from my mom. I just do three things differently. First, I add peppercorns to the pickling syrup because I like a little heat to go with the sweet. I also often add a handful of additional pickling spice and a myrtle leaf to each pickling jar. It's not strictly necessary and I don't always do it, but I think it intensifies the flavor a bit.

Watermelon Rind Pickles

4 lbs watermelon rind
1/2 c picking salt
2 1/2 c white vinegar
3 lbs sugar
20 cloves
20 peppercorns
10 small sticks of cinnamon

Optional:
More pickling spices and myrtle leaves.

Salt the rind:
Cut watermelon in 3/4 inch slices, removing all of the pink flesh and outer skin. Sprinkle with pickling salt and toss. Sore in refrigerator overnight.

Prepare the pickles:

Rinse salted rinds twice. Bring vinegar, sugar, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon to a boil in a large saucepan, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add rinds and return the mixture to a boil.
Reduce to a low boil and cook until the rind in translucent, about 20 minutes.

Add optional spices and myrtle leaves to canning jars. Fill canning jars with rinds and canning syrup. Process in hot water bath for five minutes, following standard canning procedures.