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Banana Cantaloupe
2 tablespoons granulated gelatine cup cold water 3 egg whites 4 cup lemon juice lady fingers 1 cup scalded cream 1 cup sugar 6 bananas whip from 2 cups cream Soak gelatine in cold water; dissolve in hot cream. Add sugar, whites of eggs beaten until stiff, mashed bananas and lemon juice. Chill; as it begins to thicken, fold in the whipped cream. Line a melon mold with lady fingers, add cream mixture, chill, and serve. Garnish with cream beaten and flavored, cherries and angelica.
A molded gelatine cream from the Lowney's era, shaped in a melon mold so it emerges looking like a cantaloupe. The text as printed has lost several fractions, and the method leaves raw egg white uncooked in a chilled dessert.
- Why it fails as writtenThe stiffly beaten whites of three eggs are folded into a mixture that is then only chilled. Scalded cream carries some heat, but by the time it has been sweetened, loaded with mashed banana and lemon juice, and cooled to the setting point, nothing in the bowl reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella in raw egg white. A current recipe using pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue should be followed instead.
- Missing fractionsThe ingredient list has been garbled in printing: "cup cold water" and "4 cup lemon juice" are almost certainly a fraction of a cup each — a quarter cup of lemon juice is plausible, the water quantity is genuinely unrecoverable. Treat both as unknown rather than guessing.
- Granulated gelatineTwo tablespoons is roughly two and a half to three modern envelopes, something over half an ounce. Setting strength may not map exactly onto a modern brand, so treat the quantity as a starting point.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, sold in bright green strips and used for stems and leaves on molded desserts. It has largely vanished from general grocers; candied citron or thin strips of candied lime peel filled the same decorative role.
- Lady fingersPiped sponge fingers, firm enough to line the mold and hold their shape against the cream rather than collapsing into it.
- Melon moldA ribbed, oval, two-part tin mold that gave the finished dessert its melon shape and its name. Any deep oval or dome mold of about two quarts will hold this quantity.
- YieldSix bananas, three cups of cream and a cup of sugar make a large dessert — eight to ten servings at period portions.
The name describes the shape, not the fruit: nothing in the dish is cantaloupe, but the ribbed melon mold and the pale banana cream between walls of lady fingers were meant to suggest a melon cut open at the table. Lowney's Cook Book (published for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, whose business was chocolate and cocoa) is a full general cookbook rather than a pamphlet, and its dessert chapter carries a number of gelatine molds of this type. Bananas had become cheap and reliably available in northeastern American cities by the turn of the twentieth century through the Central American fruit trade, and cookbooks of the 1900s put them into charlottes, creams and Bavarians with an enthusiasm that reads as novelty. The technique — bloomed gelatine dissolved in hot cream, lightened with beaten whites and then with whipped cream, set in a lined mold — follows the pattern of the period's gelatine creams and lined charlottes, and turns up in many books of the era under various names.