Recently my friend Pat’s car died. She was able to coast into a parking space at her job. How lucky is that? The car was towed and she began calling one person after another in an effort to get a ride home after work, she said.

She couldn’t connect with anyone and was frustrated for several hours before realizing I no longer worked and would probably be at home. She called and when I answered the phone, she yelled, “Oh, thank God!” I laughed and said, “No, it’s just Ella and why are you thanking me?”

She quickly summed up her dilemma and finally got around to asking me to take her home around 4:15 that evening. I told her I’d be there.

On the drive to her house, we talked about our childhoods. We both were raised by our maternal grandmothers and have had many conversations that led to our comparing and contrasting our upbringings.

Out of the blue, Pat asked me if my grandmother had ever made watermelon rind preserve and jam. I told her that it was nice to know that someone else had eaten the rinds and skins as a child because I’d talked about the preserve with several other friends and they’d never heard of it. Pat said her grandmother made them every summer. But as a child she never thought to learn how to cook them.  

“You gotta give me the recipes,” she said. She was disappointed that as a child I didn’t pay any more attention to my grandmother’s cooking than she with hers. A few weeks earlier, she had been flipping through a magazine and saw an ad for a store in New York that sold the preserve for more than $25 for less than a pint, she said. She was so happy that she rushed to order it and had it shipped overnight.

When the preserve arrived the next day, she hurriedly opened the jar and was floored at “how awful it tasted.” We agreed that mass produced foods never will be as good as our grandmothers’ cooking.

Then I told her a few days earlier, I had visited the local farmer’s market and had seen bushels and bushels of peaches. I immediately thought of my grandmother and how she’d preserve fruit each summer. Later that evening, I told a friend about how I longed for some of my grandmother’s preserves – especially the watermelon rind. She was floored because she’d never heard of anyone preserving the white meat of the rind.

My grandmother planted one or two rows of watermelons in her garden each year. When they’d ripen, we’d eat the melons’ red meat and save the seeds to plant the next year. Then she’d cut the green skin away from the rind. The white meat was rinsed, cut into strips and put into a large pot with water, sugar and other seasonings and cooked for several hours until the liquid turned into a thick syrup. Then she’d wash and cut the green skin into small strips, add water and seasonings and cook them long enough to make jelly out of them.

Each summer and into the fall, my grandmother would spend weeks preserving peaches, pears, blackberries, plums, watermelon rinds, crab apples, persimmons and muscadines. She’d also preserve plenty of vegetables.

We always had good eats during the winter months.

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