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Fruit Cocktail
Cut tops from Gem melons; remove seeds; fill with cubes of peaches, pineapple, oranges, sour apple, pears; cover with French dressing made with lemon juice, and add dash of nutmeg and teaspoonful Bar-le-duc currants to each melon. Serve in crushed ice.
An Edwardian first-course fruit cup served in a melon shell. The unfamiliar parts are the melon variety, the dressing, and the Bar-le-Duc.
- Gem melonsA "Gem" or Rocky Ford melon was a small netted muskmelon of roughly one to one and a half pounds, meant to serve one person. Any personal-size cantaloupe or a small Charentais works; halve a larger cantaloupe if nothing small is available.
- French dressingIn this period "French dressing" means a plain vinaigrette of oil and acid with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Made with lemon juice in place of vinegar it is about three parts oil to one part juice; use a mild oil so it does not fight the fruit.
- Bar-le-Duc currantsBar-le-Duc is a whole-berry currant preserve from Lorraine, traditionally made from hand-seeded white or red currants. A good red currant preserve is the workable substitute; currant jelly is not, since the point is the intact berries sitting on top of the fruit.
- Sour appleA tart cooking apple such as Granny Smith or a Newtown Pippin. It is there for acidity and firmness, so cut it last and toss it in the lemon dressing at once to keep it from browning.
- Cutting the fruitCube everything to about half an inch so a spoon takes a mixture rather than one fruit at a time. Drain the pineapple and peaches well, or the dressing thins into juice at the bottom of the shell.
- Assembly and holdingDress the fruit and fill the melons no more than half an hour ahead; longer and the apple and pear soften and the melon flesh weeps. Cut a thin slice from the base of each melon so it sits level in the ice.
- Crushed iceSet each filled melon in a shallow bowl or a deep plate packed with crushed ice, which chills the shell and keeps it upright. Bar-le-Duc goes on at the last moment so it stays visible.
- YieldOne small melon per person as a first course. Reckon on roughly a cupful of cut fruit and two to three tablespoons of dressing for each, depending on how large the hollowed shell is.
Fruit served at the start of the meal rather than the end was a mark of fashionable American dining from the 1890s onward, and the melon shell filled with mixed fruit was one conspicuous form of it; menus of the period list such dishes as a "fruit cocktail" or "melon cocktail" alongside oyster and clam cocktails, the name apparently borrowed from the bar. The dressing rather than syrup is what dates it: these early cups were savoury-leaning, meant to sharpen the appetite, and the shift to canned fruit in heavy syrup came later. The Bar-le-Duc is the luxury note. Currant preserve from Bar-le-Duc in Lorraine, where the berries were traditionally seeded by hand with a goose quill, was an expensive imported delicacy in American cities at the turn of the century.