Home › Entertaining › Melon Cocktail
Melon Cocktail
1 cup watermelon balls 1 cup honeydew balls 1/2 cup lemon juice 3 tablespoons sugar 1 cup ginger ale From the heart of a ripe watermelon and from a honeydew, cut small balls with a sharp potato scoop. Pour lemon juice and sugar over and chill well, turning balls occasionally. Arrange balls in glasses, add ginger ale to liquid and pour over all. Serves 6.
A first-course fruit cup of the kind that opened American dinner menus for much of the twentieth century. It comes together in minutes, but the balance of acid and sugar deserves a taste before serving.
- Sharp potato scoopThis is what we now call a melon baller, the small hemispherical scoop about an inch across. A round quarter-teaspoon measuring spoon will do the same job if less neatly.
- The lemon juice is assertiveHalf a cup of lemon juice to two cups of fruit and three tablespoons of sugar makes a distinctly tart macerating liquid. Taste after the sugar dissolves and adjust.
- Chill well means an hour or moreChill well -- The recipe gives no time; allow long enough for the balls to take on the lemon and sugar. Turn them once or twice so the pieces sitting proud of the liquid get their share.
- Add the ginger ale at the last secondPour it into the chilled macerating liquid and over the fruit just as the glasses go to the table. Mixed in advance it goes flat and the drink turns syrupy.
- Choose melons by weightChoosing the melons -- A ripe watermelon heart and a honeydew that gives slightly at the blossom end will each yield well over a cup of balls. The scraps are worth keeping for juice or a salad rather than scooping the fruit down to nothing.
- GlassesThe recipe says only "glasses"; stemmed sherbet or champagne glasses, chilled, with a teaspoon, suit it. Six servings works out to roughly a third of a cup of fruit apiece, which is a starter portion, not a dessert.
Through the 1920s and 30s a "cocktail" on an American dinner menu was as often fruit or shellfish as it was liquor, a usage already established before Prohibition, though the dry years did nothing to discourage it. Melon cups belonged to the summer end of that repertoire, helped along by rail shipment of western melons and by the small hemispherical scoop that turned ordinary fruit into something composed. Ginger ale, widely available in bottles by then, was a common finishing splash for such cups, supplying carbonation and a touch of spice without a bar. The insistence on the heart of the watermelon is a matter of both color and texture, the flesh nearest the center being sweetest and largely free of seeds.