Melon Roll
Whip stiff one pint double cream. See that it is quite dry before adding a half pint of melon pulp (mashed) and one-half cup of sugar. Freeze, and when stiff line a long, rounding mould with it. Fill in the centre with chopped melon flavoured with a little spice, wine, lemon, or other fruit flavouring. Place cover on securely, sealing with wax or butter, and pack it in salt and ice for several hours. When ready to serve it remove the frozen roll with a hot knife; slice across in inch slices and serve the circlets thus made.
This is a bombe in miniature: a shell of frozen melon cream lined into a cylindrical mould and filled with chopped fruit, sliced across into rounds. The original assumes an ice cave of salt and ice; a home freezer does the same work with less drama.
- The hinge: get the water out of the melonMelon is roughly 90 percent water, and that water becomes ice shards in the cream. Drain the mashed pulp in a sieve for half an hour and discard the free liquid, or the shell will be gritty rather than smooth.
- "Quite dry" creamThis means whipped to stiff peaks with no weeping liquid pooling under it, not dried in any literal sense. Whip cold cream in a chilled bowl and stop as soon as it holds a peak; overwhipped cream will break when the pulp is folded in.
- MeasuresA pint of double cream is 2 cups; the half pint of pulp is 1 cup, measured after mashing and draining. Double cream in the British sense runs about 48 percent butterfat, so heavy whipping cream is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- SugarHalf a cup for a quart of mixture is modest by frozen-dessert standards, and sugar is what keeps the texture soft rather than icy. Taste the pulp before folding; underripe melon may want a little more, and a tablespoon of lemon juice sharpens the flavour, which freezing dulls.
- "Freeze, and when stiff"The mixture is stiff enough to line a mould at soft-serve consistency, after a spell in a shallow pan in the freezer, stirred once or twice. Any firmer and it will not spread against the mould walls.
- Mould and sealA long rounding mould is a cylindrical mould; a loaf tin or a clean tin can will do. Sealing the seam with wax or butter kept brine out of the dessert during salt-and-ice packing; with a freezer, a double wrap of plastic film and foil is enough.
- Packing in salt and iceRock salt and crushed ice at about one part salt to three of ice will hold a mould below freezing for hours. A domestic freezer set to 0F does this without supervision; give it four hours or overnight.
- Unmoulding and slicingDip the mould briefly in warm water rather than heating the knife alone, then slice with a long blade warmed under the tap and wiped between cuts. Let the slices stand two or three minutes before serving so the cream loses its brittleness.
- YieldSomething over a quart of finished dessert; the number of inch-thick circlets depends on the diameter of the mould.
Frozen moulded desserts of this kind belong to the long nineteenth-century vogue for the bombe: an outer casing of one frozen mixture concealing a different filling, unmoulded whole and cut at the table so the section became the point of the dish. Before mechanical refrigeration reached domestic kitchens, all of it depended on the ice trade and on the freezing-point depression achieved by packing a sealed mould in coarse salt and ice, which is why the recipe fusses over sealing the join with wax or butter, brine seeping past a lid ruins hours of work. Melons appear in American fruit cookery of this period as a luxury of high summer, eaten chilled and often with wine or spice, and the instruction to flavour the chopped centre with "a little spice, wine, lemon, or other fruit flavouring" suggests melon on its own was thought to want lifting.