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Muskkmelon Ice Cream
Prepare a vanilla ice cream preparation. Cut in halves, remove all the seeds from two ripe, sweet muskmelons. Scoop out the meat, press through a wire sieve into the vanilla preparation, mix well, then proceed to cook, freeze and serve, exactly the same as the vanilla.
This is a variation entry that leans entirely on the book's vanilla ice cream, so the whole job is making a good custard base and getting the melon into it without watering it down.
- MuskmelonIn American usage of the period this is the netted orange-fleshed melon sold today as cantaloupe. Two ripe melons yield roughly 3 to 4 cups of sieved pulp, which is a great deal of liquid for one batch of custard.
- "A vanilla ice cream preparation"The entry gives no details of the base, though the instruction to "cook" implies a cooked custard. Nothing here works without that base already in hand.
- The order of operationsAs written, the melon goes in before cooking. Melon is very watery and contains a protease, which can thin a custard held over heat. Cook and chill the custard first, then fold in the sieved pulp before churning.
- Drain the pulpSieved cantaloupe is mostly water, and that water freezes into coarse crystals. Let the puree drain in a fine sieve for half an hour, or reduce some of the juice separately, before combining.
- SeasoningFreezing flattens melon badly. A tablespoon of lemon juice and a good pinch of salt in the puree keeps the flavor legible; without them the finished cream tastes faintly of nothing.
- FreezingThe original presumably assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt; a ratio of roughly three parts ice to one of salt was commonly recommended at the time. Churn until stiff and let it ripen under more ice. A modern machine will serve; because of the added water, ripen it in the freezer at least two hours before serving.
- YieldThe entry does not say how much vanilla base to make. A quart of custard plus drained melon would give roughly a generous 1.5 quarts, serving eight to ten.
"Muskmelon" was the standard nineteenth-century American name for Cucumis melo, the netted, musk-scented melon that seed catalogues and cookbooks distinguished from watermelon; "cantaloupe" only crowded it out of everyday speech in the twentieth century. Melon ices and creams were a summer staple of American hotel and restaurant kitchens, where the fruit arrived in quantity for weeks and had to be used, and where an ice cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt was in near-constant use. The terse, cross-referencing style of this entry is typical of professional-kitchen books of the era: the vanilla custard is the master preparation, and dozens of flavors are entered as one-line departures from it, which assumed a cook who already knew the base by heart.