(Pickled) Citron Cake

After successfully growing citron melons this summer, I found that I had even more melons than required to make Agnes Poist’s Old-Fashioned Citron Preserve.

I used the extra melons to make Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard‘s recipe for citron pickles, seasoned with vinegar, brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Howard’s recipe yielded a tasty syrupy concoction that might be good for cocktails or other creative uses, but I was a bit at a loss for what to do with the pickled citron melon flesh. Snacking? Fans of pickled watermelon rind might say so, but I don’t tend to snack on something like this. I worried about it rotting in the fridge.

I decided to put the “citron” to the test, as I had intended to do with Poist’s preserve. That recipe preserved the melon in a sugar syrup flavored with citrus peel. It could allegedly be used in cakes, like actual citron. Unfortunately, it molded before I got around to trying to bake with it.

What if I baked a cake with pickled citron? The idea sounded a little weird but I thought I’d try it anyway, to see just how well the citron melon could live up to its namesake.

I used a recipe from “The Maryland Cook Book,” a 1902 cookbook by Mrs. Emma J Strasburg. Originally from Staunton, Virginia, Strasburg and her husband moved to Baltimore around 1883.

The Strasburgs ran a boarding house in the 1890s. Emma’s husband David died in 1895. Her cookbook may have been for money or for prestige – I only know that it was sold at the Women’s Exchange, and that Emma died in 1903, before getting a chance to benefit from it one way or the other.

Not wanting to waste ingredients on a potentially weird cake, I copied the Citron Cake recipe from her book and quartered it, baking a tiny loaf cake.

As it turned out, the cake was very good and I baked a whole one shortly after.

Citron Melon does indeed make a nice substitute for other dried fruits. I imagine that cake recipes like this one were intended to be made with dried or candied citron peel, but after making the cake myself, I could now be convinced that cooks would consider the ingredients interchangeable with the melons.

Citron Melons are a pain to prepare, and they don’t have much to offer that watermelon rind or cantaloupe wouldn’t – Mrs. Howard’s pickle is actually for “Sweet Pickle, of Cantaloupe, Peaches or Citron.”

Nevertheless, I’ve already got my citron melon seeds ready to go for 2023.

Recipe:

Four eggs (beaten separately), 3 cups of sugar, 1 cup of butter, 1/2 cup sweet milk, 3 cups of flour, 2 1/2 teaspoonsful baking powder, 1/2 pound chopped citron rolled in flour. Bake in a sheet.

Recipe from “Maryland Cook Book,” by Mrs. E. J. Strasburg