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Watermelon for Tea
Take a fine ripe watermelon, put it on ice until it becomes very cold; cut the melon, removing the seeds, then cut into fancy shapes pieces sufficient in size for one mouthful. Place the melon into glass dish, sprinkling a little fine sugar over the first layer, then another layer of the fruit, then sugar, and so on until you fill the dish. Sprinkle sugar on top, return to refrigerator. Dish and eat as any other kind of fruit. Delightful.
A no-cook assembly whose whole success rests on temperature and on melon that is genuinely ripe. Two details in the original are worth reading closely: "put it on ice" means several hours, and the sugar is meant to be superfine.
- "Fine sugar"Most likely finely granulated sugar, the period equivalent of superfine or caster, rather than confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Granulated works if you pulse it briefly in a grinder.
- Chill first, cut secondAn uncut melon needs several hours in the refrigerator to cool through to the center; the "refrigerator" of the original would have been an icebox, which ran warmer than a modern one. Cutting a warm melon and chilling the pieces afterward gives you weeping, softened cubes.
- Sugar draws waterLeft to stand, the sugar pulls juice out and you end up with syrup in the bottom of the dish, though the original does direct you to return the sugared dish to the refrigerator. Assemble shortly before the table, or drain the syrup off and use it separately.
- "Fancy shapes"A small round or fluted cutter pressed into a thick slab of flesh would give the effect; ball cutters and scoops were also in use. Cut from the heart of the melon, where the flesh is firmest and freest of seeds.
- Seedless melonsModern seedless varieties remove the fussiest step in the original; taste before sugaring and use a lighter hand than the layer-by-layer instruction implies.
"For tea" places this squarely in the late-Victorian afternoon or evening tea table, a light spread of thin bread and butter, cake and fruit rather than a meal, and it explains the fussy mouthful-sized shapes: nothing on that table was meant to require a knife. The recipe also quietly advertises domestic refrigeration. Sprinkling sugar over layered fruit and returning it to the ice seems to have been a familiar treatment for berries and melon in American cookery writing of the period, when commercially cut ice and the household icebox had made a cold dessert an achievable everyday luxury rather than an event. Watermelon itself was a long-established Southern and mid-Atlantic summer crop by then, usually eaten in wedges out of hand; presenting it in a glass dish with sugar was the genteel parlour version of the same fruit.