Food
Bee Wilson searches for the perfect melon
Published 27 May 2002
Finding the perfect melon is the ultimate prize
In this Jubilee year, much has been made of the Queen's persistently "understated" style. A sign of how deep it runs is the lunch she chose to celebrate her 25th Jubilee at the official Guildhall banquet on 7 June 1977 - just three courses, the third course of which was merely Charentais melon and raspberries. This was a complete break with traditional pomp. No British monarch had ever before been served melon as pudding.
At the risk of sounding more conservative than the Queen, and just as bossy, melons are best at the start of a meal, whether with Parma ham or without (the exception is melon sorbet, which can be delicious). There is something so ambrosially fragrant about a good melon that it makes you feel summery and cheerful for the rest of dinner.
I feel about melon as some people feel about chocolate - there comes a point while eating it when I would happily give up all other occupations in life if only I could carry on scooping up the orange flesh for ever. Yet a large half of Charentais is no more filling and no less refreshing than a bowl of gazpacho. Indeed, Antonio Carluccio suggests making chilled melon soup by pulping ripe melon with lemon juice, salt, pepper and chives.
Watermelon is also famously good at the start of a meal, especially with crumbled cubes of feta, which is how they serve it in Greece. One of the most promising "silly season" stories of last summer was the news that they have started growing futuristic-looking square watermelons in Japan, designed to stack well into small Japanese fridges. They got very upset on news channels in America, where round watermelons are the iconic fruit of the summer, served at all major barbecues. As yet, square melons haven't made it to Britain, though plenty of tasteless ones have.
How to choose a good melon is a question that has puzzled gastronomes for centuries. It is an issue about which the French are endearingly pretentious. There is an old French saying that melons are like women: you can't judge their virtue from the outside. The original Larousse Gastronomique comments: "A connoisseur would not dream of leaving it to anyone else to choose a melon for his delectation. He smells the fruit lingeringly, he taps it lightly to discover whether it is well-fleshed or hollow. He looks to see whether it has round its stem that 'crown' which indicates that the melon is perfectly ripe and whether or not it is sweet."
The sad truth, nevertheless, is that however "lingeringly" you smell your fruit (which may, in any case, start to annoy the melon-seller, especially if you have a runny nose), there are no guarantees that the fruit will be luscious when you cut it open. It helps if you buy melons in season (Galia, Cantaloupe and Charentais are usually best from late May to July; watermelons later in the summer). There are a few other little signs. Good Charentais and Galia are perfumed (but, then, so are slightly rotten ones). A ripe watermelon should have a yellow underbelly.
Finding the perfect melon is, in some senses, the ultimate prize. The utopian Charles Fourier (1772-1837), despite being a socialist, didn't mind the thought of kings and queens, though he would have thought our current monarch's gastronomic tastes a little timid. For Fourier, the test of a perfect society was not its constitutional order so much as its melons - if they always tasted as good on the inside as they looked on the outside, then everything else would fall into place. History does not relate whether the melons the Queen ate on 7 June 1977 were perfectly ripe ones. I hope they are this year.
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