Pairing watermelon sorbet with “The Watermelon Woman” seemed fairly natural to me for this second chapter of the Summer of Scoops.

This vegan, gluten-free and soy-free recipe makes 2 pints or 6-8 “servings.”

Ingredients
3.5 cups watermelon, seeds removed
1 teaspoon melon extract

Instructions
Pour your watermelon and extract into your blender. The extract is optional, but freezing fruit can sometimes diminish the flavor, so I do highly recommend it. (Get more of my ice cream 101 tips here.)

Pulse until all the chunks of watermelon are gone.

What happens next depends on your ice cream maker. If you have a more standard one, you’ll pull your chilled (for 24 hours) bowl out and make the sorbet.

If you have one like mine, you pour the watermelon mixture into two pints then freeze them for 24 hours.

After that time, you put the pint into your ice cream maker and let it do its magic on the sorbet setting.

We happened to have some watermelon hibiscus popcorn on hand that was tasty as a topping.

Serve and enjoy with “The Watermelon Woman!”

The Easy Route
You can omit the extract, but the flavor of your watermelon might die down in the freezing process.

Watermelon is one of the most common sorbet flavors, so you probably can find one at a local ice cream shop or grocery store.

The Pairing
We first watched Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” as part of a special “Women Make Film” series on Turner Classic Movies.

I was glued to my screen, watching this young lesbian cinephile in the 1990s exploring classic film. I watched this as a thirtysomething in 2020, wishing I knew it existed in my teens in the 2000s when I was really getting into film.

Dunye also stars as a fictional Cheryl, who works at a video store and is also working on a documentary about a black actress from the 1930s known as the Watermelon Woman.

The film blends the process on Cheryl’s documentary with glimpses of her life, including working at the video store, filming community events as a side gig and falling for a customer at the video store, Diana (played by Genevieve Turner, another ’90s lesbian icon).

As a cinephile, I was captivated by the documentary part of the story and the video store scenes. As a queer person, I was fascinated to see a film from the mid-’90s with pretty much all of the main characters being LGBTQ.

I rewatched “The Watermelon Woman” earlier this week, and it was just as entertaining and invigorating to watch as the first time. It’s currently streaming on Kanopy for those in the U.S. with libraries that have access to that free streaming service.

If you decide to make watermelon sorbet and/or watch “The Watermelon Woman,” let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, threads, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes