Peel the cucumbers and slice thin; add 1 onion sliced. Sprinkle well with salt; let stand half an hour on ice; press out all the water; sprinkle with white pepper and chopped parsley. Add vinegar mixed with sugar, to taste, and salad oil. Serve at once.
August 30 — No. 30
Irish
A salted, pressed cucumber salad of the sort that turns up under a dozen national labels. The whole dish rests on getting the water out before the dressing goes on.
- The hinge: salt and pressSliced cucumber will keep weeping into the dressing unless the salt has drawn the moisture out first. Half an hour is a minimum; press firmly in a colander or squeeze in a towel, then taste before adding more salt, since the slices will have absorbed a fair amount.
- "On ice" means refrigerated"On ice" means chilled -- in a period kitchen this meant setting the dish on or in the icebox. The chill matters less than the draining, but a cold salad holds its texture better once dressed.
- Cucumbers have changedThe thick-skinned field cucumber the recipe assumes is why it begins with peeling. English or Persian cucumbers can be left unpeeled and sliced straight away.
- Slice thin means very thinA mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor gives the near-translucent rounds this style depends on. Thick slices stay watery in the middle no matter how long they sit in salt.
- OnionOne onion to an unspecified number of cucumbers is a lot of onion by current taste. A small sweet or red onion, sliced paper-thin, keeps it in proportion; it salts and presses along with the cucumber.
- The dressing, unmeasured"Vinegar mixed with sugar, to taste, and salad oil" gives no ratio. A workable starting point is three parts vinegar to one part oil with a teaspoon of sugar per quarter cup of vinegar — this style is deliberately sharp and lean, not an emulsified vinaigrette. "Salad oil" of the period could mean olive or, in American kitchens, cottonseed.
- Serve at onceMeant literally. Once dressed, the slices soften within the hour and the dressing thins as more water leaches out. Dress at the table if you can.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; two medium cucumbers will serve about four as a side.
Salting and pressing cucumbers, then dressing them with vinegar, sugar and a little oil, is a technique that spans northern Europe rather than belonging to any one country — it appears as Gurkensalat in Germany, mizeria in Poland and as plain "cucumber salad" throughout the British Isles. The Irish attribution here says more about the format of the book than about Irish cookery: this is a dish-a-day collection that assigns a nation to each date, with Belgian eggs on the 29th and a German beer soup on the 31st, so a plausible national label was all a dish needed. What is of its period is the instruction to let the cucumbers stand "on ice" — a casual reference to iced storage, assumed without comment. The insistence on pressing out the water may owe something to the old view that cucumbers were indigestible unless so treated; whatever its origin, the step survives because the salad tastes better for it.