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Cantaloupe Cream
Some Trouble, but Worth It.
Cut a small nutmeg cantaloupe in half. Remove the seeds and fill with ice cream. Serve on thin china plate with spoon with maraschino cherries on each half. Of course cantaloupes should be kept ice cold.
A fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the only real work is in the sourcing and the chilling. Two points decide whether it succeeds: the melon must be genuinely cold and genuinely ripe.
- Nutmeg cantaloupeAn older market name for the small, heavily netted muskmelon — the netting was thought to resemble the surface of a nutmeg. Any small ripe cantaloupe of about 2 lb works; look for one that fills a cupped hand, since half a modern 4 lb melon is far too much melon for the ice cream to balance.
- Ice cold means ice coldThe original is explicit about this. Hold the whole melon at refrigerator temperature for several hours, and chill the plates as well; a lukewarm melon half turns the ice cream to soup before it reaches the table.
- Trim the baseNot in the original, but a halved melon rocks on a flat plate. Shave a thin slice from the rounded underside of each half so it sits level, taking care not to cut through into the cavity.
- Which ice creamVanilla was the standard fountain flavour and is the safe choice here; the recipe does not specify, so a lemon or orange ice is not ruled out. Allow about 2 generous scoops per half, softened just enough to pack into the seed cavity without melting.
- Maraschino cherriesThe 1900s fountain cherry was a firm, bleached cherry steeped in maraschino liqueur or an imitation of it; the present supermarket version is corn-syrup sweet and dyed. A jar of bourbon or Luxardo-style cherries is much closer to what the writer had in mind.
- Yield and timingProbably two servings, though the recipe's single "thin china plate" leaves this ambiguous. Assemble at the moment of serving; this cannot be plated in advance and held.
- Cut melon and cleanlinessRind carries surface bacteria that a knife drags into the flesh. Scrub the whole melon under running water and dry it before halving, and do not leave the cut halves at room temperature.
The soda fountain of the early twentieth century sold far more than carbonated drinks: by the 1900s a good fountain was a light-lunch counter with ice cream, sundaes, egg drinks and fruit service, and formulary books like this one gave the dispenser a repertoire to work from. Fruit-and-ice-cream service was the fountain's answer to the summer trade. "Nutmeg melon" was standard grocers' and seedsmen's language in that era for the small netted muskmelon, a name usually traced to the resemblance between the raised netting on the rind and the veined surface of a nutmeg, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented; catalogue varieties of the period carried the name. The frank heading — "Some Trouble, but Worth It" — suggests a book written for a working operator rather than a home cook.