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Melon Float
Small, ripe cantaloupe (or musk melon), cut lengthwise. Scoop out seeds and fill with ice cream (vanilla generally used); sprinkle with powdered sugar to taste.
A soda-fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on the melon. A few notes on terms and proportions.
- Muskmelon and cantaloupeIn American usage of this period the two names were used interchangeably for the netted orange-fleshed melon sold today as cantaloupe. What Europeans call a true cantaloupe (ribbed, hard-rinded) is a different thing and is rarely on sale here.
- Ripeness is the whole recipeThere is no cooking and no acid or sugar syrup to hide behind. Choose a melon heavy for its size, fragrant at the stem end, with a smooth beige scar where the vine detached; a green stem scar means it was cut early and will not sweeten off the plant.
- "Small" melon, halvedA half of a small melon of a couple of pounds makes one serving, in keeping with the fountain's single-portion trade. A large supermarket melon halved gives two very generous servings; quarter it and trim a flat base instead.
- Powdered sugarThe term did not necessarily mean what confectioners' sugar means today; ground sugars were sold in several grades and "powdered" was often coarser than the starch-cut sugar now sold under that name. Any fine sugar dissolves on contact with cold melon rather than sitting in grains.
- How much ice creamThe cavity of a small cantaloupe takes roughly one generous scoop, about a third of a cup. Overfilling defeats the point, since the dish is meant to read as melon with ice cream in it rather than a sundae in a rind.
- Chill the melon, not just the creamRefrigerate the whole melon several hours before cutting. Room-temperature fruit melts the ice cream into a pool within a minute or two, and the contrast of cold firm flesh against cold soft cream is the only texture the dish has.
- ServingCut and fill to order. Set the half in a shallow dish or on a bed of crushed ice so it does not rock, and send it out with a spoon immediately.
At a soda fountain a "float" ordinarily meant ice cream set adrift in soda water, and the name was stretched, as here, to cover anything with a scoop floating in or on it. Fountain manuals of the early twentieth century were written for men working a marble counter with a fixed stock of syrups, sodas and one or two flavors of ice cream, so seasonal fruit was the cheapest way to lengthen a menu: the same vanilla that went into a soda could be dressed as a melon dish for a few weeks each summer. Cantaloupes are generally said to have reached northern cities in quantity only once refrigerated rail shipping became common, which may be part of what put a ripe melon within reach of a drugstore counter at all.