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Cucumber Salad
Pare the cucumbers rather thickly and lay them in ice water for about an hour and a half. After wiping them very dry, slice very thin, adding an onion, which must be sliced also. Make a salty water and allow the cucumber and onion to remain in this for another hour. After squeezing every drop of water from them place in a salad bowl-sprinkle pepper and bits of parsley over the whole. Cover with vinegar and set on ice until ready for use.
A straightforward vinegar-dressed cucumber salad, closer to a quick pickle than to anything creamy. The soaking and squeezing are the whole technique, and they are what keep it from turning watery in the bowl.
- The hinge: draw out the waterThe salting and the subsequent squeezing are not optional garnish steps. Cucumber is around 95 percent water, and unless that water is pulled out first it leaches into the vinegar and thins the dressing in the bowl.
- Salt strength"A salty water" is unquantified. Around 1 tablespoon of salt per quart of water is a reasonable brine for a one-hour soak; much stronger and an hour will leave the slices unpleasantly salty even after rinsing. Taste a slice before you dress them and rinse briefly if needed.
- Pare thicklyOlder field cucumbers had tough, bitter skins and this instruction plausibly reflects that. Modern English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling at all, though peeling does give a paler, more translucent slice.
- Slice very thinA mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater gets slices thin enough to go nearly transparent after salting. Thick slices stay crunchy and raw-tasting and take up much less of the vinegar.
- The onionOne whole onion to an unspecified number of cucumbers is assertive by current taste. A small sweet or red onion, sliced paper-thin, is a milder option; it also softens in the brine alongside the cucumber.
- VinegarThe recipe specifies only "vinegar." Cider vinegar at around 5 percent acidity is a reasonable choice; a spoonful of sugar will soften it if it bites too hard.
- "Set on ice"An icebox instruction, meaning simply well chilled. Refrigerate at least an hour so the vinegar penetrates, and eat the same day; the slices go limp on keeping.
- YieldTwo medium cucumbers prepared this way collapse to about two cups dressed, serving four as a side.
Cucumbers dressed with vinegar, onion and pepper are one of the oldest and most widely shared summer salads in Northern and Central European cooking, and the salt-and-squeeze method is familiar from German kitchens, where the dish is still often called simply Gurkensalat. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks were unusually anxious about cucumbers: they were widely believed to be indigestible, and the long soak in ice water followed by salting was as much a supposed corrective for that as a matter of texture. The instruction to "set on ice" places the recipe firmly in the icebox era, when a chilled salad was a small piece of household display.