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Melons Curried
Use for curries, also, the half ripe melons. Peel and cut in small cubes or slices nearly an inch thick and fry carefully in a little butter. Prepare the curry in another saucepan, frying an onion (sliced) in a tablespoon of butter until a golden brown. Add to this the fried melon; sprinkle over it a teaspoonful of curry powder (or quantity preferred) and let cook up, covered. A little water or milk may be added if necessary.
A frugal way to use melons that never sweetened up, treating them as a vegetable much like summer squash. The whole dish takes about twenty minutes.
- Which melon"Half ripe" means firm, barely perfumed flesh, probably a muskmelon or cantaloupe of the sort common in kitchen gardens, still crisp enough to hold a cube. A fully ripe melon collapses into wet fibre in the pan; an under-ripe one behaves much like a firm zucchini.
- The cutThe recipe allows either small cubes or slices "nearly an inch thick"; the thicker pieces are the safer choice if you want them to survive frying and then a covered simmer. Seed and peel first, and pat the pieces dry so they brown rather than steam.
- Frying "carefully"Melon holds a lot of water and butter burns easily, so use medium heat and do not crowd the pan. You want colour on the flat faces, four to five minutes, not a fully cooked cube.
- Bloom the curry powderThis is the hinge. A period curry powder is raw ground spice, and sprinkling it over and covering the pan at once tastes dusty. Stir it into the onion and butter for thirty seconds before the melon goes back in, so the fat carries the spice.
- The liquid"A little" means just enough to keep the pan from going dry, added only if needed; the melon releases its own juice as it softens. The recipe allows either water or milk.
- Cook time"Let cook up, covered" is a short covered simmer, only until the cubes are translucent and yield to a fork but still hold their shape. Longer and the dish turns to sweet mush.
- SeasoningThe original omits salt, which the dish needs badly. Salt at the end, and a squeeze of lemon or lime cuts the melon's sweetness.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies one onion but no quantity of melon and gives no yield; one medium melon with the single onion would serve three or four as a side. Rice, or a plain roast or curried meat alongside, would suit it.
Ready-mixed curry powder was advertised in Britain from the later eighteenth century and became a common grocery item in America during the nineteenth, used on vegetables, eggs and leftovers with little reference to Indian practice. The dish belongs to a broader habit of treating unripe fruit as a vegetable, and cookery collections of the period also curry or pickle green mangoes, green tomatoes, cucumbers and vegetable marrows, all valued because they are firm and neutral and take on the flavour of the fat and spice. A curry made from half ripe melons also answers a genuine problem of the pre-refrigeration garden, where a melon patch ripened unevenly and pale, hard late fruit was unfit for the table raw. Frying it in butter with browned onion was one rescue, alongside sweet pickling and preserving in syrup.