Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Watermelon with Brandy
Watermelon with Brandy
Cut out and remove a piece of the center of a watermelon; and pour in the side one pint of brandy; replace the piece of melon in its former position and put the melon on the ice-box for six hours. Set it on a dish and send to the table either whole or cut in slices.
A hotel-era party trick that still works, provided the melon is ripe and the brandy is poured slowly enough to be absorbed rather than pooled.
- A pint is two cupsThat is a generous amount of brandy for one melon, and it likely presumes the large field watermelons of the period. For a modern seedless melon of 8-10 lb, a cup to a cup and a half is closer in proportion.
- Cutting the plugCut a wedge or cylinder from the top rather than the true center, angling the knife inward so the piece seats back in place like a cork. Save every drop of juice that escapes and pour it back in with the brandy.
- Pour slowlyThe flesh takes up liquid far more slowly than the wide opening suggests. Add the brandy in stages over several minutes, letting each addition sink before the next, or most of it will sit in the cavity and run out when the melon is cut.
- "The ice-box" means the refrigeratorThe recipe allows six hours chilled; longer, even overnight, will carry the spirit further through the flesh, and the melon can be turned once or twice so the brandy does not settle at the bottom.
- Seal the plugOscar's kitchen simply replaced the piece. Tape the plug down or set the melon plug-side up in a bowl; a leaking melon in a modern refrigerator is a nuisance.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe allows the melon to go to table whole or already sliced. A 10 lb melon will give roughly 10 to 12 servings.
- StrengthNone of the alcohol cooks off. The flesh nearest the cavity is potent, the rind end mild, and slices should not be handed to children or anyone avoiding alcohol.
Oscar Tschirky was ma i tre d'ho tel at the Waldorf from 1893, and his 1896 book records the kind of dining-room theater that made the hotel's reputation: a dish that is barely cooking at all, but arrives whole and produces a small event when it is cut. Spirited melon is often said to descend from the Southern habit of dosing ripe fruit with whatever was at hand — wine, rum, peach brandy — both to flavor it and to stretch it into a dessert course, though that lineage is more folk memory than documented history. Watermelon itself was a summer commonplace by the 1890s, cheap enough that pouring a pint of good brandy into one was the extravagance, not the fruit. The instruction to "send to the table" is a reminder that Oscar was writing for a staffed household as much as for a hotel: the melon was prepared in one room and presented in another.