Peel the cucumbers and cut into inch slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and dip in beaten eggs and fine bread-crumbs. Season with salt and pepper and fry in hot lard until brown. Serve with tomato-sauce and veal chops.
August 7 — No. 7
French
A straightforward breaded fry, but cucumber is roughly 96 percent water and the recipe says nothing about that. Everything depends on drying the slices before they meet the egg.
- Salt, then wait, then dryThe salt in the original is treated as seasoning, but it does real work. Let the salted slices sit 20-30 minutes in a colander, then press them dry between towels; wet cucumber steams inside its crust and the coating slides off.
- Slice thickness"Inch slices" most likely means rounds cut about an inch thick rather than lengthwise strips, though the wording is ambiguous. If yours are seedy, scoop the centres or use smaller ones, since the seed core turns to liquid when heated.
- Frying fat and temperatureLard suits the flavour and browning here, though any neutral fat with a high smoke point works. The original says only "hot lard"; around 350-365F is a reasonable modern target -- hotter and the crumbs colour before the cucumber softens, cooler and they absorb fat.
- Cooking timeTwo to three minutes a side is enough. Cucumber does not need to be cooked through in the way a potato does, and long frying collapses it into pulp inside the crust.
- Breadcrumbs"Fine bread-crumbs" means dried crumbs from stale bread put through a sieve, not panko and not the soft fresh kind. Dried crumbs pack tight against the egg and give the even brown surface the recipe is after.
- Double seasoningThe recipe seasons twice, once on the cut cucumber and again after the crumbing. Go light on the first if you are salting to draw water out, or the finished slices will be over-salted.
- YieldTwo medium cucumbers give roughly four servings as a side. Fry in batches and hold on a rack in a low oven rather than on paper, which softens the underside.
Fried cucumber turns up across nineteenth-century European and American cookery, and the label "French" in a book like this may signal method as much as provenance: egg-and-crumb, fry in hot lard, serve with a sauce. Cucumbers reached the table far more often cooked in this period than they do now, appearing stewed, stuffed, boiled with cream, and fried, partly because summer gluts had to be used and partly because the raw cucumber carried a long-standing reputation as indigestible. The pairing with veal chops and tomato sauce is consistent with what is often said of service at the time, when a fried vegetable might be arranged around a plain roasted or grilled meat rather than served on its own plate. Books of this kind, assembling one dish per day under a national flag, were a popular form, offering variety to middle-class households while keeping the technique squarely within the familiar.