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Watermelon with Sherry Sauce
Scoop balls out of the center of watermelon using French potato cutter. Pour over Sherry Sauce and place them carefully in a freezer, packed in salt and ice, let stand until thoroughly chilled (about one and a half hours). Serve with Sherry Sauce in tall champagne glasses.
A first course rather than a dessert, and one that depends entirely on temperature: the melon should be biting cold but never frozen. Two pieces of period vocabulary need translating before you start.
- "French potato cutter"This is a melon baller — a small hemispherical scoop, sold in the period for cutting potatoes into balls for garnish. A 1-inch baller gives the right size; press it in fully and twist for a clean sphere.
- "Place them in a freezer"Not a freezer compartment. This means the packing tub of a hand-crank ice-cream freezer, or any pail in which the covered container of fruit is buried in crushed ice and rock salt. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, so the brine sits well below 32F and chills the melon fast without freezing it through.
- Modern equivalentA metal bowl set in a larger bowl of ice and coarse salt does the same job, though you will need to check it early rather than wait out the full hour and a half; or simply refrigerate the balls in their sauce for two to three hours. Avoid the deep freeze: watermelon is over 90 percent water and turns to slush and then to mush once ice crystals rupture the flesh.
- TimingThe recipe allows about an hour and a half, but chilling time will vary with the quantity of melon and how tightly it is packed; check it earlier. The melon is ready when it is cold enough to ache slightly on the tongue but still crisp.
- The sherry sauceThe sauce is given separately in the book, so this page cannot be read alone. If you are working from this page only, a cooled sugar syrup cut with sherry to taste will serve. Add the sherry off the heat so the alcohol and aroma survive.
- DrainageMelon sheds a great deal of juice as it chills. Drain the balls before glassing and either discard the pink liquor or stir it back into the sauce; poured together undrained, the sauce arrives watery.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe calls for tall champagne glasses; chill them. Yield depends on the melon and the size of the scoop, so judge the number of glasses by the fruit you have.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when the American Sunday dinner was staged in courses, and a chilled fruit course could open the meal in place of soup in hot weather. The salt-and-ice chilling belongs to the icebox household: before mechanical refrigeration was common in homes, ice broken up with rock salt was the usual way to bring anything below freezing point, and the ice-cream freezer pail could do double duty as a chiller. Watermelon dressed with wine appears in both European and American cookery, sherry being a commonly stocked fortified wine in an American pantry of the day.