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Salad (Cups watermelon tablespoons)
2 cups watermelon 4 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg Juice of 1 orange Lettuce Line a salad bowl with lettuce leaves and in it place the watermelon cut into small cubes. Mix the sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, and sprinkle over the melon; then pour the orange juice over all. 2 bananas 2 oranges
A plain fruit salad of the loose-leaf era, dressed with sugar, warm spice and orange juice rather than mayonnaise. Nothing here is technically difficult; the work is all in the melon and the restraint with the sugar.
- The stray last line"2 bananas 2 oranges" almost certainly belongs to a neighbouring recipe on the leaf, not this one; a heading appears to have been lost. Ignore it, or treat it as an invitation to add sliced banana and orange segments to the bowl.
- YieldTwo cups of cubed melon serves two generously, or four as a small side. Scale up freely; the spice mixture multiplies without trouble.
- The sugar is period-heavyFour tablespoons of sugar on two cups of watermelon is a great deal by modern taste. Start with one tablespoon, taste, and add more only if the fruit is bland.
- SeedsThe original assumes a seeded melon and a cook willing to pick. A seedless watermelon cut into half-inch cubes gets you to the same place faster.
- Drain the melonWatermelon sheds a great deal of water once cut and salted or sugared. Cube it, let it sit in a colander ten minutes, then dress it, or the orange juice and spice will end up as a pink puddle in the bottom of the bowl.
- Dress at the last momentSugar draws juice out of the fruit within minutes. Chill the cubed melon and mix the sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg in advance, but combine everything only as the bowl goes to the table.
- NutmegA quarter teaspoon grated fresh is right; the pre-ground jar tastes dusty against melon and you may want less of it.
- The lettuceA cup-shaped leaf lettuce, not romaine hearts or mesclun. Its job here is structural and decorative rather than something to be dressed and eaten.
Fruit salads served on a lettuce leaf were a fixture of American cookery from the 1890s through the 1930s, and they belong to a moment when "salad" meant almost anything arranged on greens rather than anything dressed in oil and vinegar. The lettuce here is a plate liner, a convention often associated with the era's fondness for individual composed salads at ladies' luncheons. The cinnamon and nutmeg are the more interesting survival: spicing melon is an old habit, generally traced to the European practice of serving melon with sugar, ginger or pepper to counteract what earlier writers regarded as its dangerous coldness and wateriness. By Mrs. Fryer's day the reasoning had been forgotten but the spice box stayed. Loose-leaf cook books like this one were sold as binders so a housekeeper could add pages, rearrange them by season, and replace a leaf spoiled by use.