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Melons for Salads
The fully ripe fruit is delicious for salads, cut in cubes and served alone or with other fruits, as tomatoes or peaches or bananas. Serve with mayonnaise plain or flavoured with some liqueur or French dressing to which has been added a suspicion of Maraschino, or serve with whipped (See Salads in Introductory Recipes.) cream.
This is less a formula than a set of permissions, typical of how fruit chapters were written a century ago. A few of its terms mean something different now.
- "A suspicion of"Period shorthand for a very small amount, no more than a few drops; the original gives no measure. Maraschino here means the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cherries.
- French dressing, 1900s senseSimply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion, usually three parts oil to one of vinegar. Nothing like the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name. Lemon juice suits melon better than vinegar.
- Mayonnaise on fruitNot an error. Fruit salads bound with mayonnaise, or with mayonnaise folded into whipped cream, were standard restaurant and luncheon fare in this period. If it does not appeal, the French dressing option gives the same effect with less weight.
- Whipped cream as dressingUnsweetened or barely sweetened, whipped only to soft peaks so it coats rather than sits in lumps. Sweetened stiff cream turns the salad into a dessert.
- Ripeness is the whole dishWith no cooking, sugar or acid to hide behind, an underripe melon has nowhere to go. Cantaloupe should give slightly at the blossom end and smell of itself through the rind.
- Handle the waterCubed melon and tomato both weep. Cut them ahead, drain in a colander for fifteen minutes, chill, and dress at the last moment or the dressing thins to soup.
- BananasSlice them last and toss with a little lemon juice; they brown far faster than the melon or peaches.
- QuantityThe original gives none. One medium cantaloupe, cubed, serves four as a salad course, and about half a cup of dressing is plenty for that amount.
- The missing cross-referenceThe parenthetical points to a salads section in the book's introductory recipes, presumably where the mayonnaise and French dressing formulas were given. Its position, splitting "serve with whipped ... cream", reads as though something went astray in typesetting.
Melon eaten as a salad rather than a breakfast fruit was a familiar idea in American and British cookery of this period, when a fruit salad course was often served apart from the dessert. Books of this period frequently paired fruit with mayonnaise or with cream thickened by whipping — a habit that looks strange now but made sense when "salad" meant anything dressed and served cold, and when mayonnaise was among the household's usual cold sauces. The maraschino called for is the dry Italian and Dalmatian liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, long used to perfume fruit compotes; its name was later borrowed, in the United States, by the sweet preserved cherries now sold under it. That single flavouring drop, added to an otherwise plain dressing, suggests how this kind of collection expected its readers to cook: modestly, but with one deliberate grace note.