ISSUE 66, BEVERAGES FROM PLANTS, Part 4: Watermelon Juice
Watermelon Juice
A kind of automatic consciousness sometimes takes over when shopping in a grocery store, particularly if you have other things on your mind. You pull your default items—usual brands—off the shelf and toss them into the cart with scarcely a thought. This state of mind explains my recent encounter with Simply Watermelon Juice Drink. I thought I had seized a plastic container of red grapefruit juice. But my hand closed around a similarly curved neck of a similarly color juice on the same shelf in the same refrigerated section of the store. You don’t throw perfectly usable bottles of beverage away, so I breached the container and took a swig. Not overly sugary. That distinct watermelon flavor and a surprising mild acid note. But rather thin bodied. Little of the bracing bitter mouth flash of grapefruit. Particularly white grapefruit. But I hadn’t seen a container of white grapefruit juice in my local grocery in three years. Only red. I flipped over the container to look at the ingredients. Disappointing—not pure watermelon juice—cane sugar added—and lemon juice! When I looked to see whether Simply Watermelon had competition in the market, I found that Ocean Spray and Tropicana had recently introduced their own watermelon juice products to market. It seems to be a moment.
But the fact that the processors added the sugar and sour made me understand why the drinking of watermelon juice had never been a major practice in the United States. There had been no early 20th century equivalent of the orange juice, grape juice, and grapefruit juice moment. The physical culture movement did not tout watermelon juice as a tonic, youth restorer, blood thinner, or vitamin source. I’m not saying the watermelon juice was entirely ignored by the agricultural press or culinary experimentalists. Its just that whenever it became the focus of attention, the immediate impulse was to alter its character or composition. As early as 1820 the topic first impinges upon the American reading public as newspaper editors begin featuring short articles on Watermelon Syrup. Evaporating watermelon juice over heat thickens the juice and concentrates the sugar until the liquid in your pot has body and more than a little sweetness This watermelon syrup in the 1830s was added to soda water at the country’s first soda fountains. Yet watermelon syrups’s apotheosis was when it became a standard item to use when flavoring snow cones at circuses and amusement parks late in the 19th century. It remains a snow cone flavor.
In 1855 a piece entitled “Watermelon Juice” appeared in the Prairie Farmer magazine. It extolled the qualities of the Juice . . . when cooked down.
The article is particularly interesting because it envisions an intenser condition of sugary reduction: watermelon molasses. When Nat Bradford’s brought his famous family heirloom melon before the public a decade ago, his instinct told him that selling 20 pound seeded picnic melons had limited potential. So the first crop went to restaurants, to distillers for rendering into watermelon brandy, and was reduced to watermelon molasses. It was a spectacular product, but so expensive to make that its market was limited to high end confectioners. In subsequent years, however, he found that the juice from his Bradford watermelons had a ready sale to brewers who loved using it for season gouzas and ales.
Nat Bradford boiling down watermelon juice to molasses in Glenn Roberts’s Sorghum Evaporator. 2013
Bradford had another vision: in parts of Africa where potable water was scarce, watermelons supplied a clean alternative for hydration and he sent seeds of his family watermelon there to support the growing of large juicy melons that could supply both nutriment and quench thirst. There the juice of an old, huge heirloom picnic melon supplied the most refreshment and performed the most good. They were indeed grown out to great effect.