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Watermelon Balls
With a potato ball cutter, cut balls from the heart of a ripe and very cold watermelon. Serve on small grape leaves that have been washed in cold water and chilled.
Barely a recipe at all — closer to a plating instruction — but it depends entirely on temperature and on the part of the melon you use, so a few things are worth saying.
- Potato ball cutterThis is what we now call a melon baller or Parisienne scoop. The book gives no size for the balls.
- "The heart"The core running down the centre of the melon is the sweetest and, in older seeded varieties, the part with the fewest seeds. Cut the melon in half crosswise and work outward from the middle, stopping well before the pale flesh near the rind.
- Seedless melonsSeedless watermelon was not widely available until much later, so staying in the heart may also have meant avoiding seeds. With a modern seedless melon you can scoop farther out, though the flesh near the rind is still watery and bland.
- Cold is the whole pointChill the whole melon overnight rather than chilling the cut balls briefly. Watermelon is around 92 percent water and tastes flat unless it is thoroughly cold; serve it as cold as the refrigerator will make it.
- Grape leavesUse fresh young leaves from vines you know have not been sprayed — not the brined leaves sold in jars for dolmas, which are salty and limp. Wash them in cold water and hold them on ice or in the refrigerator so they stay rigid. Fig, lemon or nasturtium leaves work the same way if grape is not to hand.
- DrainageScooped balls weep. Let them sit in a colander over a bowl in the refrigerator for ten minutes before plating, or the leaves will float in pink juice.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield or number of servings. Three or four balls per leaf, one leaf per person.
Melon balls belong to the era when the melon baller — a French-style scoop associated with professional garde-manger work — became a common item in the American home kitchen. The conceit here is a hot-weather one: the entire dish is temperature and contrast, cold red fruit against a cool green leaf, with no cooking, no sauce and nothing to heat the kitchen. Serving food on leaves turns up in summer menus of the period, and a grape leaf was free to anyone with a vine on the property. Watermelon itself, generally traced to Africa and long established in the American South, was more often eaten in wedges off the rind; presented in neat spheres it suited a formal course.