We make watermelon confit in South Africa, and melons are used to make spoon sweets in the Mediterranean area. Plus the rind gets pickled or stewed. And the seeds are also roasted and eaten.
And there’s that grilled watermelon = tuna thing.
? Take one chunk of primal cow - call it maybe a pound? Good for 2 people or one glutton. Give it a quick dunk in boiling water, pat it dry with clean paper towels. I prefer the 2 cleaver chop over dirtying a grinder [have to disassemble it, wash it and put it away. Easier to just chop] Form into a neat pile [most chefs use a ring mold to make a nice disc of meat] garnish if that is what you want to call it with an egg yolk, and +surrounding it a little pile of capers, chopped red onion, chopped gerkin [not pickle relish] and rye bread on the side, with a salt shaker and pepper grinder at hand.
If you have a cuisinart, makes chopping almost as fast as a meat grinder with hte advantage of being able to put meat cubes, chopped onions, a gerkin and capers in and hitting the button, but it makes a boring tartare because you can’t customize it on the fly, you get what comes out after hitting pulse.
Give me a chunk of beef, the ingredients and a pot of boiling water, I can crank out tartare for 2 in about 15 minutes.
These are all processing steps, no?
I didn’t say they were hard steps, not in the least, but it’s still a fair bit of processing. To distinguish it from the OP’s statement of “food eaten as it is.”
All that being said, it’s a lot less work than some of the specials I’ve seen detailing Asian meatballs being prepared where a half dozen brawny guys pound meat with thick iron bars until it’s a paste, while pulling out every bit of tendon and connective tissue!
Anything that is inedible until prepared is going to have zero eaten as is so the opposite is not an interesting question.
Melons aren’t very popular in Western cooking but Asian and especially Japanese cuisine does quite a lot with melons.
Sweet melons or Wax Gourd aka Winter Melon? I’d say wax gourd is more like a cucumber or zucchini in flavor and use. I realize it opens up a rabbit hole of different names, origins and definitions.
I’ll amend my answer to “sweet melons” and see what happens.