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Cantaloup, Surprise
Prepare a pint only of vanilla ice cream. Cut three small or medium ice-cold muskmelons in halves lengthwise, pick out the seeds and spongy parts, then scoop out the meat, cut it into very small pieces, and place in a bowl with an ounce sugar and two tablespoons curacao. Mix well, then replace in the six half-melon shells. Evenly divide the vanilla ice cream over them. Neatly smooth the surface to dome-like shapes. Pour a tablespoon raspberry syrup and sprinkle a little finely shredded cocoanut over each, dress on dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A cold assembly rather than a cooked dish, so the only real work is timing and temperature. Everything hinges on the melons and the ice cream being properly cold when they meet.
- Muskmelon means cantaloupeThe netted orange-fleshed melon sold as cantaloupe in the US is what the recipe wants. Choose ones that feel heavy and smell faintly sweet at the stem scar; underripe melon has no flavour to carry the liqueur.
- MeasuresA pint of ice cream is 2 cups, which is one small supermarket tub. An ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons, and it can be reduced or left out entirely if the melons are sweet.
- Curacao, and what to use insteadCuracao is a sweet orange liqueur; Grand Marnier, Cointreau or triple sec all work. For an alcohol-free version, use orange juice with a strip of zest steeped in it for a few minutes.
- Raspberry syrupHere a thick sweetened fruit syrup rather than a thin flavouring syrup. Simmer raspberries with an equal weight of sugar and strain, or use a good seedless raspberry coulis.
- CocoanutFreshly shredded coconut, unsweetened. Sweetened desiccated flake will do, but toast it lightly and use less, since the syrup is already sugar.
- Freeze the shellsAfter scooping, drain the hollowed halves and put them in the freezer while you macerate the flesh. A room-temperature shell melts the dome from below within a minute or two.
- Assemble at the last momentFill, dome the ice cream, sauce and garnish as the plates go out. Left standing, the melon juice and syrup thin the ice cream into soup.
- Yield and serviceSix halves, one per person. The folded napkin on the serving dish was standard presentation of the period and would also help steady the melons; a bed of crushed ice under them does the same job and keeps them cold.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), one of the great hotel-kitchen compendia of its day; Filippini had cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's confidence about folded napkins and dome-shaped ice cream belongs to that restaurant world rather than to the home cook. Melon with ice cream and liqueur was a familiar summer dessert of the period, a dish that depended on ice, the commercial ice trade having by the turn of the century made ice-cold fruit and frozen cream more reliable in a well-run establishment. Curacao takes its name from the Caribbean island where the bitter laraha orange grew, and the melon's own name is traditionally traced to Cantalupo, a papal estate near Rome where the fruit is said to have been grown after its introduction from the East. The pairing of cold melon with a sweet orange liqueur survived well past this book, and still turns up wherever a cook wants a dessert that requires no oven in August.