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Recipes To Serve Canteloupes Simply
Canteloupes should be placed on ice and thoroughly chilled, then cut in half and the seeds removed, being careful not to scrape out the delicate pulp nearest the seeds as this is the most spicy portion of the fruit. Place the halves on plates of cracked ice, reversing the usual order of serving ice in the hollow of the melon, as by this latter method the flavour is drawn out instead of preserved within the pulp. TO SERVE WATERMELON SIMPLY (Three Ways) 1. Have the melon thoroughly iced, then slice across about an inch thick, remove the rind and cut the solid red pulp into cubes, diamonds, hearts, or other shapes as desired. Place in salad bowl or individual dishes, dust with fine sugar, and serve at once. 2. Cut in inch slices across; remove rind and serve the heart (each large slice) of the red pulp in round or oval form; sprinkle with sugar. If cut into small rounds or ovals (inch length) sprinkle with maraschino and serve as cherries or plums. 3. If the melon is preferably to be placed upon the table whole it should be held lengthwise toward one; the knife inserted near the top and cut diagonally downward (instead of straight downward) toward the other end, leaving four or five inches as a base. Three inches to the left of the point where the knife was first inserted cut again, this time diagonally toward the far end of the first line of cut, thus making a pointed tongue. Continue to cut up and down in this manner until the melon is completely cut around, when two equal sets of points will result, and these jagged halves of the melon can easily be pulled apart. (The melon may be plugged or halved twelve hours before serving, filled with wine and let "ripen".)
These are serving directions rather than cooked dishes, so the whole recipe turns on temperature and on how the fruit is cut. A few of the terms and assumptions belong to a kitchen that had an icebox rather than a refrigerator.
- Ice under, not inThe one instruction worth keeping is the author's own: bed the melon halves on cracked ice rather than filling the seed cavity with it. Ice sitting in the hollow melts into the flesh and dilutes the juice, which is what she means by the flavour being "drawn out".</p>
- Chilling times"Thoroughly iced" means several hours, not thirty minutes. Whole melons need 4 or more hours at refrigerator temperature to cool to the centre; cut halves chill faster but dry at the surface, so cover them.
- Cantaloupe then and nowThe melon sold as cantaloupe in America is a netted muskmelon, orange-fleshed, rather than the true European cantaloupe with its ribbed, warty rind. The instruction to leave the pulp nearest the seeds intact is worth following: the flesh toward the centre is generally the sweetest and most aromatic, which is presumably what the author means by "most spicy".
- Fine sugarThis is superfine or caster sugar, not powdered sugar, which contains cornstarch and turns cloudy on wet fruit. Granulated sugar works but sits in grains on the surface.
- MaraschinoHere this means maraschino liqueur, the clear cherry spirit from Dalmatia distilled from marasca cherries with their stones. It is not the pink syrup from a jar of modern maraschino cherries; use the liqueur, or the fruit will simply taste of sweet dye.
- The pointed-tongue cutThis is a vandyke or sawtooth cut, worked with a long thin blade held at a shallow angle. Score your intended line all the way round with the knife tip first, then cut through; correcting a wandering cut in a watermelon is not possible.
- The wine-filled melonPlugging a whole melon and filling it with wine for twelve hours should be done in the refrigerator, not on the sideboard. Cut melon at room temperature is a well-documented growth medium for bacteria, and the alcohol in table wine is far too dilute to do anything about it.
- YieldHalf a cantaloupe per person is a standard serving. A watermelon of 15-20 lb yields well over twenty cups of cubes once the rind is off -- far more than a fruit course for eight to ten, so cut only as much as you need.
The name is generally traced to Cantalupo, said to be a papal estate outside Rome where the melon was grown after seeds arrived from Armenia, and Americans applied it loosely to any netted muskmelon. Directions like these belong to the era when domestic ice was cheap and plentiful but mechanical refrigeration was not: a household book could assume cracked ice on a plate and an iced melon in the cellar, and the fussiness about where the ice sits reflects a period when chilling fruit properly was a mark of a well-run table. Melon appears at the head of the meal in menus of the 1890s and 1900s, served as a breakfast fruit or a first course, and the sculptural watermelon cuts here are part of the same impulse that produced carved radish roses and jellies in moulds. The suggestion of steeping a whole melon in wine is an old trick, often said to be of Southern origin in the United States, though similar practices with sweet wine and melon are recorded much earlier in Europe.