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Darkies' Delight
Wash a good-sized watermelon and chill thoroughly. Cut a slice from the narrow end, to serve as a cover, take out most of the pulp and be careful not to leave in any seeds. Make a strong lemonade seasoned with a little ginger syrup, and pour into the watermelon. When serving put the lemonade with pieces of water-melon into a glass one fourth full of cracked ice. Serve with straws.
A hollowed watermelon used as a punch vessel, filled with sharp ginger-spiked lemonade. The mechanics matter more than the measurements, since the original gives none.
- Chill first, and keep it coldThe melon does the cooling here, so it needs several hours in the refrigerator before it is cut. Once hollowed and filled it should go back into the cold; cut melon left at room temperature is a well-documented vehicle for Salmonella and Listeria, and a punch bowl standing out on a summer afternoon is exactly the wrong condition.
- "Strong lemonade"The book expects lemonade concentrated enough to survive dilution by melon juice and ice. Work at roughly double normal strength — about 1 cup lemon juice and 1 cup sugar to a quart of water — and taste after the melon flesh goes in.
- Ginger syrupThis could be a sugar syrup steeped with bruised fresh ginger, or a bottled syrup of the kind sold for soda-fountain use. To make it: simmer equal parts sugar and water with a few tablespoons of sliced fresh ginger for ten minutes and strain; "a little" is best read as an ounce or two per quart, enough for warmth rather than heat.
- Cutting the vesselTake the lid from the narrow end so the melon sits on its broad base, and slice a thin sliver off the bottom if it rocks. A melon baller removes the flesh more neatly than a spoon and gives you the "pieces of watermelon" the serving instruction calls for.
- SeedsSeeded varieties were the only ones available in 1919, hence the warning. A modern seedless melon removes the problem entirely, though the small pale immature seeds are harmless in the glass.
- Capacity and yieldA hollowed 10–12 lb melon holds roughly 2 to 3 quarts once the flesh is out — about 12 to 16 servings over ice. Make more lemonade than you think you need; the cavity is larger than it looks.
- ServingLadle rather than pour, so the melon pieces are distributed. Straws in 1919 were paper or rye; the recipe assumes a tall glass a quarter full of cracked ice, which is what a household chipped from a block.
This comes from On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon, a collection of non-alcoholic drinks published as national Prohibition arrived — "on the water wagon" being the period slang for abstaining. Books of this kind appeared in the period, teaching hostesses how to fill the gap left by the punch bowl, and the hollowed melon was a favourite because it supplied both spectacle and chill in an era when a household icebox held a block, not cubes. The recipe title is the ugly part of the record: dialect and minstrel-derived names were routinely attached to watermelon dishes in American cookbooks of the period, a caricature so ordinary that publishers used it without comment. The drink itself has nothing to do with it, but the name is a plain measure of how casually the trade traded in the stereotype.