I’ve felt prompted to write about very few dishes immediately after eating them. This salad is one of those exceptions. Just seconds ago, I consumed a plate of juicy cantaloupe, crispy prosciutto, and thinly sliced iberico cheese. Every bite was a delight to eat and orchestrate. With each visit to my plate, I let my fork find the perfect-sized melon cube, followed by a bit of the cheese and a crackly piece of ham, and dragged the artfully designed stack of ingredients through the pool of lemon juice, olive oil, and flaky salt at the bottom of my plate. I love when food commands my attention, sensorily, mentally, even emotionally. And of all dishes to make such a command, it was a salad with fruit and meat. Call me pleasantly surprised.
I can’t remember the last time I bought a cantaloupe. I’m not sure I ever have before this weekend? I associate cantaloupe with both my college cafeteria and airport food. The cafeteria salad bar always had a daily bucket of fruit. Which is nice in theory, but when the bucket only contained the same kinds of fruit for the 200+ days you eat it a year, you tend to grow tired of said fruit rather quickly. Like all good cafeteria’s, ours tried to be economical. Thus, the fruit bucket repeatedly contained cubed honey dew, cantaloupe, watermelon, and grapes. By sophomore year, I couldn’t eat another bite of melon. Oh, and airport food? You know what I’m talking about -- every food stop that sells to-go food always stocks a plastic fruit cup with, you guessed it, the same cafeteria combo.
Needless to say, I put this salad off till the end of prime melon season (September). Today, September 19, 2021, my appreciation for cantaloupe was delightfully rekindled. I used half of the melon for this salad, slicing it into thin strips and removing the rind, and cubed the other half for my lunches this week.
The prosciutto needed roughly 11 minutes in the oven to sufficiently crisp. It made my apartment smell briefly like another feature of my college cafeteria: bacon. Instead of ricotta salata, which I could not find, even at Whole Foods, I used a mild and firm Spanish cheese called iberico. Without ricotta salata to compare it to, I think it worked perfectly.
Before topping the melon with ham and cheese, I sprinkled the slices with lemon juice and flaky salt. After the ham and cheese joined, I drizzled everything with olive oil and freshly cracked black pepper. I intend to serve this salad many more times, both for a fun snack on a rainy day, and as a sure-to-be crowd-pleaser when guests come over.
134 recipes cooked, 91 to go.
