Peel large cucumbers; cut off the ends; scoop out the seeds; sprinkle with salt. Then mix boiled rice with some chopped green onions and stuff the cucumbers. Lay the cucumbers in a stew-pan; pour over 1 cup of stock and the juice of a lemon; add 1 tablespoonful of butter, and let cook until tender. Serve hot, and pour over a well-seasoned white sauce. Garnish with parsley.
A straightforward braise of stuffed cucumbers, written in the terse style of a daily calendar cookbook. A few quantities are left to the cook's judgement.
- Quantities and yieldThe recipe gives no counts. Four large cucumbers, hollowed, will take roughly 1 cup of cooked rice and 3-4 chopped spring onions, and serve four as a side dish.
- The salting stepSprinkling the hollowed shells with salt draws out water so they do not flood the pan. Give them 20-30 minutes, then blot dry before stuffing; the original assumes this and does not say it.
- Choose the right cucumber"Large cucumbers" here means a thick-skinned, seedy field cucumber with walls sturdy enough to hold a filling. English or Persian cucumbers are too slim and watery; a fat field cucumber, or a small marrow, behaves as intended.
- Green onionsThese are scallions or spring onions. Both white and green parts, chopped fine, since they cook only as long as the cucumber does.
- Stock and cookingOne cup of stock makes this a shallow braise rather than a boil; the original does not say whether the pan is covered. Simmer gently, roughly 20-25 minutes, until a knife slides in with no resistance and the flesh turns translucent. Pushed further the shells collapse and shed their filling.
- RiceUse rice cooked just short of done. Fully soft rice absorbs the braising liquid and turns to paste inside the cucumber.
- The white sauceA basic bechamel: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg or lemon. The braising liquid, strained and reduced, can stand in for part of the milk.
- Lifting them outA slotted spoon or fish slice, not tongs. Braised cucumber shells split easily under pressure.
Stuffed vegetables run straight through Greek and wider Eastern Mediterranean cooking under the family name yemista, "the stuffed ones" — tomatoes, peppers, courgettes and aubergines, all hollowed and filled with rice and herbs; stuffed cucumber is the outlier here rather than an established member of the repertoire. The rice-and-onion filling with lemon and broth here is recognisably that tradition, though a Greek cook would more likely have reached for olive oil than butter and added dill or mint. Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day from a different country, seem to have been a familiar sight on the early twentieth-century American kitchen shelf: they promised variety to households cooking on a narrow rotation, and their "national" recipes were, one imagines, often pared back to ingredients an ordinary grocer stocked. The white sauce poured over at the end is the giveaway — a French-derived finish added to make the dish legible to a reader raised on Anglo-American cooking.