Decades after the fall of a locally famous New Jersey fruit, dedicated revivalists are giving the Jenny Lind muskmelon its name back
In an upstairs room at The Dead Rabbit cocktail bar on the southern tip of Manhattan, a curious group gathered to preview an intriguing new aperitif wine called Jenny, created using a once-famous New Jersey muskmelon. This celebration was literally years in the making, made possible by a remarkable team of individuals that includes a botanist-bartender, a slow-food pioneer, several farmers, and a boutique distiller. All of them share a passion for authentic flavors with a sense of place that honor the agricultural heritage of the Garden State.
Heading up this project is Danny Childs, author of the James Beard Award–winning book Slow Drinks and founder of the company of the same name. Childs brings his background as a trained botanist to the bar, using ingredients foraged from the wild, from his cocktail garden, and from local farms. He built his reputation at The Farm and Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill, which is where he met Jeff Quattrone, an agricultural historian and founder of Library Seed Bank.
Quattrone works with community partners to revive heirloom seeds that are vital to New Jersey’s agricultural history. For years he worked to bring back the tomato varieties that Campbell’s sourced from South Jersey farms for their famous soup. Quattrone says, “Seeds are part of the history of the people who grow them, who are attached to those seeds. They’re genetic archives.
The Jenny Lind melon is a natural extension of this work. Named after a popular Swedish opera singer in the 1850s, this incredibly soft, sweet, and juicy muskmelon was once the most popular melon in the Philadelphia and New York markets. The Jenny Lind’s flavor is remarkably succulent, but it has a short window of ripeness and doesn’t ship well. Quattrone remembers piles of Jenny Linds in big baskets at South Jersey farmstands in the 1970s and ’80s, but the variety all but disappeared due to an increasingly industrial food system that prioritizes shelf stability over flavor.
“SEEDS ARE PART OF THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE WHO GROW THEM, WHO ARE ATTACHED TO THOSE SEEDS. THEY’RE GENETIC ARCHIVES.”
Scaling Up
Thanks to a handful of seed savers who refused to let the strain die out, the Jenny Lind was added to Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, a global archive of small-scale, high-quality foods that are important to the culture and history of a specific place and are at risk of disappearing. In 2018, Quattrone met Childs at the Farm and Fisherman and shared a few seeds with him. They grew out the seeds in the cocktail garden behind the restaurant, and the results were just as tasty as they’d hoped.
“On a global level, we’re losing things like the Jenny Lind melon all the time,” Childs says of his interest in its revival. “On a local level, it tells the food history of our region. And on a personal level, it just tastes better.”
The next step was figuring out how to extend the Jenny Lind’s fleeting flavors to a broader audience. Childs wrote an article for Modern Farmer about his early findings, and Quattrone shared it on social media. In a stroke of luck, he was contacted by a South Jersey farmer who offered some Jenny Lind seeds that his family had been saving for many years. Sure enough, they turned out to be true Jenny Lind melons with the characteristic “outie” belly button on its blossom end—and, more importantly, with that floral, musky, unmistakable aroma.
It was time to scale up. Plowshare Farms in Bucks County grew a few hundred pounds of Jenny Linds from saved seed. Matchbook Distilling in Greenport, New York, was the obvious partner in creating a beverage to capture what makes this fruit special. They describe themselves as “dedicated to production of spirits that champion agriculture, anthropology, tradition and science,” and Childs had already worked with distiller Leslie Merinoff Kwasnieski through Slow Food USA. Matchbook used every part of the fruit to make the Jenny Aperitif, macerating the melon flesh in Long Island Chardonnay and fortifying it with a distillate of the rinds. The result is a very special product with a true sense of place and heritage.
“ON A GLOBAL LEVEL, WE’RE LOSING THINGS LIKE THE JENNY LIND MELON ALL THE TIME. ON A LOCAL LEVEL, IT TELLS THE FOOD HISTORY OF OUR REGION. AND ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, IT JUST TASTES BETTER.”
A Toast to Preservation
That night at The Dead Rabbit, guests were enchanted by a simple, refreshing cocktail of the aperitif mixed with prosecco over ice. In a characteristic spirit of collaboration, everyone was sent home with their own packet of Jenny Lind seeds. During the Q&A, one experienced bartender said that he has been disappointed by industrial fruit liqueurs for a long time and didn’t know a complex, expressive product like the Jenny Aperitif was even possible.
The Jenny Aperitif is available in a limited run only through Astor Wines, a wine store in Manhattan. Fortunately, this year’s experiment was so successful that another batch is already in the works. But Jenny’s success is about more than just one product. It’s a bellwether, demonstrating that customers are curious about where their drinks come from. Farm-to-table restaurants have been featuring heritage foods for decades—think Jimmy Nardello peppers, Gravenstein apples, and Cape May sea salt—and the beverage industry is finally catching up.
Childs is emphatic: “We’ve been so disconnected from where our food comes from, whether wild or cultivated, vegetable or animal. Ingredients like this, that have a strong sense of place and regional history—we need to do all we can to ensure that they survive.”
