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Watermelon Half Frozen
Break the ripe pulp of the melon into fine bits with a silver fork and place it in freezer without dasher. Let stand two hours packed in salt and ice and serve in sherbet glasses or the half shell of the melon chilled and garnished at base with vines.
A still-frozen melon ice with nothing added but cold — essentially a granita made without sugar or syrup. Nearly all of the original instruction concerns equipment that no longer sits in the kitchen.
- "Freezer without dasher"The freezer here is the hand-cranked ice cream can that sat inside a wooden bucket packed with ice and salt. Removing the dasher meant no churning: the mixture set undisturbed, which is why it comes out coarse and crystalline rather than smooth. A metal loaf pan or shallow baking dish in the home freezer gives the same result.
- Ice and saltThe traditional packing is roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, which drives the brine well below freezing. A modern freezer at 0F does the job on its own; two hours is about right for a shallow pan, and a fork dragged through it once at the halfway mark keeps the texture loose.
- The silver forkSilver was likely specified because old carbon-steel and iron utensils could leave a metallic taste in acidic fruit. Any stainless fork is fine now. What matters is breaking the pulp into shreds rather than pureeing it.
- SeedsSeedless watermelon did not exist when this was written, so the pulp would have been full of seeds; the recipe says nothing about removing them. Seedless melon makes the job faster; if using a seeded melon, remove the black seeds but do not fuss over the pale immature ones.
- No sugarNothing is added, so the dish is only as good as the melon. Very ripe, deep-red fruit at the height of summer is essential; underripe melon freezes into something watery and bland. A spoonful of sugar or a squeeze of lime per quart of pulp is a defensible modern liberty, and also softens the ice slightly.
- ServingHalf-frozen means exactly that: a slush that mounds on a spoon, not a solid block. If it has hardened past that point, let it stand ten minutes and rake it with a fork before serving. The hollowed melon shell needs chilling well in advance or it will melt the ice.
- YieldAn average 8-10 lb watermelon yields roughly 10-12 cups of pulp. The recipe gives no yield of its own, and that quantity would fill considerably more than eight to ten sherbet glasses.
Still-freezing — setting a mixture in ice and salt without churning — was the older of the two ice-making methods, and it survived in nineteenth-century American kitchens for water ices and granites long after the crank freezer had taken over for custards. Recipes of this kind, requiring nothing but fruit and ice, are often said to have become more common as commercial ice delivery reached ordinary households in the later nineteenth century; watermelon in particular was cheap, abundant and locally grown across most of the country in late summer. The garnish of vines at the base of the shell belongs to the same period's enthusiasm for table decoration.