Nance O'Neil
ORANGE CANTELOUPE
Remove the seeds from small ripe canteloupe and fill the craters with diced orange pulp which has been well sweetened and chilled.
If wanted for breakfast prepare the oranges over night, but do not add to the canteloupe till morning. Vry July Wave Rid
STUFFED CABBAGE
Scoop out the center of a medium-sized head of cabbage. Fill with a pudding made of ½ lb. of pork and ½ lb. of beef chopped very fine, three eggs, a pint of cream and three cups of pulverized zwiebach.
Season with pepper, salt and clove, and tie up in a pudding cloth. Boil from two and a half to three hours and serve with drawn butter.
A two-ingredient breakfast dish that lives or dies on the fruit. Everything here is about ripeness, chilling and timing.
- "Small ripe cantaloupe"The American cantaloupe of this period is the orange-fleshed netted muskmelon, not the smooth-rinded European melons. Look for melons about 4 inches across so that a half makes one serving; a heavy, fragrant melon with a slightly yielding stem end is ready.
- The craterHalving the melon and scooping out the seeds and loose fibre leaves the hollow the recipe calls a crater. Trim a thin slice off the rounded base of each half so it sits level on the plate.
- Preparing the orangesDiced orange pulp means the flesh cut free of membrane and pith, then chopped — supreme the segments over a bowl and dice them, keeping the juice. Two medium oranges fill four melon halves.
- SweeteningSuperfine or granulated sugar to taste, roughly a tablespoon per orange, stirred in the night before so it dissolves in the released juice. Taste before adding more.
- Why the fruits are kept apartMelon flesh tends to weep once it sits in sugared juice, and it will take on citrus flavour as it stands. Filling only at the moment of serving keeps the melon firm and the two tastes distinct.
- ChillingBoth elements want to be thoroughly cold, near 40F. Chill the whole melon rather than the cut halves if you can, and cover the oranges tightly overnight or they will take on refrigerator odours.
- YieldOne small melon serves two. Serve with a teaspoon and, if you like, a small sprig of mint, though the original keeps it bare.
Chilled melon filled with other fruit belonged to the American breakfast table and the summer hotel menu around 1900, when refrigeration and rail-shipped Rocky Ford cantaloupes had made cold melon a fashionable first course rather than a garden luxury. Actor-benefit cookbooks of this kind gathered short, characterful contributions from stage names, and the appeal was as much the signature as the dish; a performer touring hotel to hotel would plausibly know a dish assembled from whatever the dining room could ice overnight. Nance O'Neil (1874-1965) built her reputation on the heavy classical tragedies, which makes the contrast the editor draws between her repertory and this two-ingredient breakfast a fair one.