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To Dress Cucumbers
Cucumbers should be gathered very early in the morning, and put in cold water, where they should remain until about an hour before needed, having been peeled. Then slice the cucumber as thin as possible and drop into ice water; let them remain in this until ready to be eaten; then drain off every particle of water, fill a dish with alternate layers of the cucumber and white onion sliced thin. Season with salt and pepper. Pour a cup of vinegar over it, and place a lump of ice on top.
This is a dressed cucumber salad in the nineteenth-century manner: no oil, no cream, just vinegar, onion and cold. The whole point is temperature and crispness, so the soaking is not optional fussiness.
- The hinge is the drainingEvery drop of soaking water must come off before the vinegar goes on, or the dressing is diluted into nothing. Drain in a colander, then spread the slices on a towel and blot.
- Slice thinner than feels sensibleA mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor gives the near-translucent slices intended here. Thick slices stay watery in the middle and never take the seasoning.
- Modern cucumbersThe recipe assumes a field cucumber with tough skin and developed seeds, hence the peeling. An English or Persian cucumber needs no peeling and no seeding, though the ice-water soak still firms it.
- The lump of iceAt the time this chilled the dish at table, and the meltwater thinned the vinegar as it went. Chill the serving bowl and the salad in the refrigerator instead, and skip the ice unless you want the dilution.
- The vinegarA cup is a lot of vinegar, and period cider or white wine vinegar was often weaker and less uniform than the standardised product sold today. Taste first; if it is a sharp 5 percent distilled vinegar, cut it with water or use less.
- White onionSweet onion or a mild white onion sliced paper-thin is closest to the intent. A soak in cold water for ten minutes takes the harshness off if the onion is aggressive.
- Salt timingSalting draws water out fast. Season just before serving, not while the layers sit, or the crispness you spent an hour building drains away.
- YieldTwo medium cucumbers and half an onion will make roughly four small side servings. It does not keep; assemble within the hour of eating.
Dressed cucumbers of this kind belong to a long English and American tradition of serving the vegetable raw with vinegar, salt and pepper, a treatment recorded in household books well before the nineteenth century. Cucumbers had a persistent reputation as cold and indigestible, and the vinegar was widely believed to correct that quality as much as to season it. The instruction to gather them at dawn and hold them in cold water points to a kitchen supplied by its own garden rather than a market, and the lump of ice on top marks the era when domestic iceboxes and commercial ice delivery had made chilled food a modest luxury worth showing off at table. Oil dressings for cucumber were also known.