What the Heck Is Watermelon Molasses?
After reading about it in an old cookook, there was only one way to find out how it tasted
I spent half a day boiling down watermelons, all because of a book I bought at the Goodwill years ago. It was an unassuming 1979 spiral-bound cookbook from Fresno, full of casserole and Jell-O salad recipes. But once I browed deeper through its yellowed, typewritten pages, I noticed something puzzling about Our Favorite Recipes. Besides otherwise standard 1970s fare, the book had recipes with East European-sounding names like vareniks, glase, and berrocks. Most intriguing of all, a number of recipes called for something called watermelon molasses.
It’s an unlikely ingredient with an unlikely background. When the Internet and all of the Russian and German cookbooks as I could get my hands on failed me, I decided the best way to learn why a bunch of ladies in California’s Central Valley once reduced vats of watermelon juice was to do the same thing myself.
Thus, one hot summer day, my clothes spattered with rosy blotches and my sink full of sticky strainers and stockpots, I followed the cryptic procedure outlined in Our Favorite Recipes and haplessly transformed four watermelons into a quart of grainy, garnet-red syrup with a musky aroma reminiscent of freshly picked summer squash. While sweet, it wasn’t very fruity—hardly the rediscovered delight I’d imagined pouring over pancakes or mixing into cocktails. Who would go through so much work to make something so esoteric?
Resourceful, frugal people, that’s who. As it turns out, the Volga Germans who came to Fresno in the late 1800s were ancestors of some of Our Favorite Recipes’ contributors. And Volga Germans had an unrivaled fondness for watermelon.
Between 1763 and 1767, Germans of a number of faiths, including Lutherans and Mennonites, took up Catherine the Great’s invitation to Europeans to immigrate to Russia. They farmed along the Volga River and collectively came to be called Volga Germans. During their years in South Russia, they maintained their language and culture and didn’t pick up many of the local ways, but they did acquire the region’s mighty affection for growing watermelon and enjoying big slabs of the fruit at social gatherings. Watermelon molasses—nardek in Russian—allowed them to preserve any melons they couldn’t enjoy fresh or pickle.
About a century later, many Volga Germans emigrated from Russia to America and parts of Canada. They were very good dry land farmers, and some of these immigrants settled in Fresno County, in California’s Central Valley. Through intermarriage with other families, their Mennonite faith melded with other churches and their Russian-influenced food heritage underwent the same great American evolution, which Our Favorite Recipes entries like “Yankee Doodle Goulash” so perfectly illustrate.
