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Stewed Cantaloup
When cantaloups are cut they are sometimes found to be too green or too tasteless to be served as fresh fruit. In such cases, cut the pulp out with a spoon or knife, add a little water, sugar according to the sweetness of the melons, and a few thin slices of lemon. Stew until tender.
1 pint milk
A salvage recipe for underripe melon, and a sound one: heat and sugar do for a bland cantaloupe roughly what they do for a bland pear. The quantities are left to judgment, so taste as you go.
- The stray line"I pint milk" at the end appears to be a printer's orphan, most likely a line that drifted in from an adjacent recipe. Milk has no place here, and would risk curdling against the lemon.
- How much waterVery little. Two or three tablespoons per pound of melon flesh is enough to keep things from scorching before the fruit releases its own juice. Cantaloupe is about ninety percent water and will flood the pan on its own.
- Sugar"According to the sweetness of the melons" means start at about 2 tablespoons per pound of pulp and adjust. A hard, green melon wants more; a merely dull one wants less, or the result tastes of nothing but syrup.
- LemonThe thin slices are structural as much as decorative: the acid sharpens flat fruit, and the pith and peel may contribute a little pectin to the syrup. Lift the slices out before serving if they have gone bitter.
- TimingCut in 1-inch pieces, green melon softens in 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer. Push it further and it collapses into a stringy purée; the aim is fruit that yields to a spoon but holds its shape.
- Heat levelKeep it at a slow simmer, uncovered. A hard boil drives off the faint melon aroma that is the only reason to bother, and the syrup reduces faster than the fruit cooks.
- Yield and servingOne medium cantaloupe gives about 3 cups of pulp, enough for four small servings. Serve chilled with the syrup, alone or over plain cake or rice pudding; it also keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
Melons were an unforgiving purchase before reliable long-distance refrigeration and any consistent grading of ripeness — a cantaloupe was bought whole, cut open at the table, and either good or a loss. That is the domestic problem this entry addresses, and it is why a book devoted to left-overs treats a fresh melon as salvage rather than as fruit. The technique is the same one applied to unripe pears, hard peaches and windfall apples: water, sugar and a slice of lemon, stewed until the cell walls give way and the sugar has somewhere to go. Cookbooks of the period also pickled underripe cantaloupe rind in vinegar and spice, on the same principle that nothing edible leaves the kitchen uneaten. The spelling "cantaloup", without the final e, was standard in English through the nineteenth century and is generally traced to Cantalupo, an estate near Rome where the melon is said to have been grown after its introduction from the eastern Mediterranean.