Cantaleupes
Cut out carefully the end with the stem, making a hole large enough to admit an apple. With a spoon, remove the seed. Fill with ice, replace the round piece taken out, and place on end. Eat with powdered sugar, salt, and pepper.--Mrs. S. T.
A serving method rather than a cooked dish, and it depends entirely on the melon and the cold. Two things need translating: what "ice" meant in a nineteenth-century larder, and what happens to melon flesh sitting against it.
- CantaleupeAn older spelling of cantaloupe. In Virginia at this date the word covered any of the netted, orange-fleshed muskmelons; a supermarket cantaloupe is the right thing.
- "A hole large enough to admit an apple"About 2½ to 3 inches across. Cut at a slight inward angle so the plug sits back in place like a stopper rather than dropping through.
- The iceHousehold ice came in sawn blocks and was chipped for use, so the original most likely means coarse shards rather than cubes or shaved ice. Large pieces melt slowly and are what you want; crushed ice floods the cavity quickly.
- Chilling timeAn hour or two upright in a cool place should be enough to bring the flesh to genuine cold. Left much longer, the melting ice is liable to waterlog the interior, and the flesh nearest the cavity can turn slack and flavorless.
- Keep it uprightStood stem-end up, the plug and the ice stay put and the meltwater is held in the cavity rather than running out; a melon on its side is more likely to leak and to chill unevenly. A ring cut from a towel, or a small bowl, will hold it steady.
- Drain before servingLift the plug, pour off the water and any remaining ice, then cut into wedges. Nothing in the original says to do this, but it saves a wet plate.
- Sugar, salt, and pepperNot alternatives — all three, offered at the table so each eater seasons a wedge. Use fine sea salt and pepper from the mill; the salt sharpens the sweetness and the pepper reads as faintly floral against cold melon.
- YieldOne melon serves two to four, depending on size. Scale by the melon rather than trying to chill a large one longer.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives — hence the initials at the end of this entry — is full of small directions like this one, where the whole point is the cold. Ice was a purchased or laboriously stored commodity: cut from northern ponds and shipped south by the ice trade, or packed in a plantation icehouse over winter, and a recipe that spends a lump of it on chilling a single melon is quietly showing off. Filling the cavity rather than burying the fruit in a cooler is efficient with a scarce resource, and it chills from the inside, where melon flesh is sweetest. The name is generally traced to Cantalupo, a papal estate near Rome where the melon is said to have been grown after its introduction from the eastern Mediterranean, though the spelling wandered for centuries. Salt and pepper on melon, which reads as a novelty now, appears often enough in nineteenth-century Southern cookbooks to have been unremarkable, and the habit survives in the sprinkle of salt still given to watermelon.