If you do not care to take the trouble of peeling the fruit, prick it in several places with a needle, and proceed as directed.
Unique Preserves. ✠
Gather young cucumbers, a little longer than your middle finger, and lay in strong brine one week. Wash them and soak a day and a night in fair water, changing this four times. Line a bell-metal kettle with vine-leaves, lay in the cucumbers, with a little alum scattered among them; fill up with clear water; cover with vine-leaves, then with a close lid, and green as for pickles. Do not let them boil. When well greened, drop in ice-water. When perfectly cold, wipe, and with a small knife slit down one side; dig out the seeds; stuff with a mixture of chopped raisins and citron; sew up the incision with fine thread. Weigh them, and make a syrup, allowing a pound of sugar for every one of cucumbers, with a pint of water. Heat to a lively boil, skim, and drop in the fruit. Simmer half an hour, take out and spread upon a dish in the sun while you boil down the syrup, with a few slices of ginger-root added. When thick, put in the cucumbers again; simmer five minutes and put up in glass jars; tying them up when cold.
Damsons
Are put up in the same manner as plums, but pricked instead of skinned.
Preserved Orange Peel. (Very nice.) ✠
Weigh the oranges whole, and allow pound for pound. Peel the oranges neatly and cut the rind into narrow shreds. Boil until tender, changing the water twice, and replenishing with hot from the kettle. Squeeze the strained juice of the oranges over the sugar; let this heat to a boil; put in the shreds and boil twenty minutes.
Lemon peel can be preserved in the same way, allowing more sugar.
Orange Marmalade. ✠
Allow pound for pound. Pare half the oranges and cut the rind into shreds. Boil in three waters until tender, and set aside. Grate the rind of the remaining oranges; take off and throw away every bit of the thick white inner skin; quarter all the oranges and take out the seeds. Chop, or cut them into small pieces; drain all the juice that will come away, without pressing them, over the sugar; heat this, stirring until the sugar is dissolved, adding a very little water, unless the oranges are very juicy. Boil and skim five or six minutes; put in the boiled shreds, and cook ten minutes; then the chopped fruit and grated peel, and boil twenty minutes longer. When cold, put into small jars, tied up with bladder or with paper next the fruit, cloths dipped in wax over all. A nicer way still is to put away in tumblers with self-adjusting metal tops. Press brandied tissue-paper down closely to the fruit.