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Melon Sundae
Take a small-sized cantaloupe, cut in two, remove the seeds, slice off a small portion from the bottom so that it may stand squarely. Place in the half of the cantaloupe the usual amount of ice cream. Top with crushed pineapple and whole cherries. Insert spoon upright in meat of cantaloupe. Place upon napkin and serve on fancy plate.
A soda-fountain assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the work is all in the choosing and the chilling. A few of the assumptions behind it no longer hold at the modern counter.
- The hinge: a cold, dry shellHalve and seed the melon, then chill it thoroughly before filling. A room-temperature cantaloupe, and any wet seed cavity, will slacken the ice cream quickly; blot the hollow dry with a towel first.
- "Small-sized cantaloupe"Read this as a genuinely small melon, about 4 inches across, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb, so a half is a single serving rather than a shared bowl.
- "The usual amount of ice cream"A sundae of the period was one or two scoops. About 4 fl oz total fills a half melon of this size without hiding it.
- Crushed pineappleAt a fountain this may well have meant a sweetened crushed-pineapple preparation packed in syrup rather than plain drained fruit. Either way, drain canned pineapple well, or the dish goes watery.
- Whole cherriesMost likely maraschino cherries, though the recipe does not specify. Drain them so the syrup and dye do not bleed across the ice cream.
- Cutting the baseSlicing a thin round off the bottom rind is what keeps the half from rocking. Take off as little as possible or you will breach the flesh and leak melon juice onto the plate.
- The upright spoonA long-handled soda spoon pushed into the melon flesh, not the ice cream, so it stands and does not sink. A modern iced-tea spoon works the same way.
- YieldOne melon makes two sundaes. Assemble both at the last moment; this does not hold.
Soda fountains sold showmanship as much as sweetness, and the melon sundae belongs to a family of early-twentieth-century "fruit shell" service — ice cream in a hollowed cantaloupe, pineapple, or orange. The napkin goes under the melon itself, on the plate. Cantaloupes were seasonal and regional in this period, which puts the recipe firmly in high summer; the crushed pineapple and maraschino cherries, by contrast, came from jars behind the counter and were available year round, and their presence reflects how completely canned and preserved fruit had come to define fountain work by the 1900s.<br><br>The instruction to insert the spoon upright is a small piece of trade practice: a sundae that arrives with its spoon standing in the fruit announces itself as made to order.</p>