Casaba Melon
Cut the melon in two, take out the seeds and slice into suitable portions for serving. Have the melon on ice for some hours before cutting, or chill the slices. Serve with the melon, quarters of limes, powdered ginger, and sugar.
A serving formula rather than a cooked dish, so the whole thing rests on temperature and on picking a melon worth chilling. A few notes on the parts that have shifted since the 1930s.
- "On ice" means thoroughly coldAn ice-cooled box held roughly 45-50F, while a modern refrigerator runs 37-40F, so a long spell in the fridge will likely take a whole melon colder than the book had in mind. Two to three hours for cut slices is plenty, and very cold melon mutes what flavor a casaba has.
- Judging ripeness without scentThe editor's note is correct that casaba gives off almost no aroma. Go by weight for its size, a yellow rather than green rind, and a blossom end that yields slightly to thumb pressure.
- Powdered gingerGround dried ginger, not fresh. A light dusting is the point; ginger with melon turns up in cookbooks of the era, as do salt and pepper. Fresh grated ginger is a different and much wetter proposition.
- LimesThe recipe calls for limes cut in quarters. Standard Persian limes are on the large side, so sixths or eighths may give a more sensible squeeze per portion.
- Seeds and stringy pulpScrape the seed cavity clean with a spoon before slicing, so no fibrous webbing is left on the slices.
- PortioningAn average casaba runs 4 to 7 lb and gives six to eight crescent slices from each half. Serve rind on, with a fruit knife, or cut free from the rind and cross-cut into bite widths if the melon is going out as a first course.
Melon at the start of a meal was standard American service through the first half of the twentieth century, and the casaba was the winter member of the rotation, arriving from California when cantaloupe season had long ended. The name is traditionally traced to Kasaba (now Turgutlu) in western Turkey, and the melon reached California growers in the 1880s; it keeps for weeks in cold storage, which is exactly why a book of cool-weather menus reaches for it. The accompaniments look eccentric now but were conventional then: cookbooks of the era routinely offered melon with lime or lemon, powdered ginger, salt, or even a grinding of pepper, all of them ways of putting some edge on a fruit whose sweetness is mild and whose perfume is nearly absent.