Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beef Steak and Cucumbers
Beef Steak and Cucumbers
When cucumbers are plentiful this makes an economical and pleasant dish. Peel and slice a large cucumber and three or four onions. Brown them in a frying-pan. Broil or fry two pounds of rump steak, then put it on a dish. Simmer the cucumber and onions in half a pint of good gravy, and pour round the meat. Time, ten minutes to fry if thick. Probable cost of steak, 1s. 4d. per pound. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward steak-and-onion dish with cucumber standing in for a second vegetable. The only unfamiliar part is the cucumber itself, which is cooked rather than served raw.
- Cook the cucumber properlyThe hinge is browning the cucumber before it goes into the gravy. Undercooked it stays watery and squeaky; taken far enough in the pan it collapses into something closer to a marrow or courgette. Salt the slices for twenty minutes and pat dry if the cucumber is a wet modern greenhouse variety.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 300 ml. "Good gravy" here means well-reduced brown meat stock, not a flour-thickened gravy from granules; the cucumber and onions release liquid, so start on the thick side.
- Two pounds of rumpRoughly 900 g, cut as one or two thick steaks rather than four thin ones. Rump repays a hot pan and a rest of five to ten minutes before slicing, which the original does not mention.
- "Ten minutes to fry if thick"That is a long time by modern standards, though the original gives no doneness. A 1-inch rump steak needs about three to four minutes a side for medium-rare; use a thermometer at 125-130F for rare to medium-rare if you want certainty.
- Broil means grillIn a British book of this date "broil" is cooking over or under direct heat. A ridged pan or a hot grill both work; the recipe treats the two methods as interchangeable.
- Onion quantityPeriod onions may well have run smaller than modern ones, though the recipe gives no size. Two medium onions, sliced, is a reasonable equivalent against one large cucumber.
- Prices1s. 4d. per pound is sixteen pence in pre-decimal money, quoted to let a housekeeper cost the meal. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
- YieldFour servings, as stated, with a starch alongside. Boiled or mashed potato takes up the gravy better than bread.
Cooked cucumber is much older in English kitchens than the salad bowl suggests: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery books stew, fry and stuff cucumbers routinely, and pair them with mutton and beef as well as serving them raw. Cassell's frames this one as thrift rather than novelty, opening with "when cucumbers are plentiful" -- a reminder that before year-round imports a glut of a frame-grown crop was a reason to cook it in quantity. The book's method, brown the vegetables, cook the meat separately, then finish the vegetables in gravy and pour them round, is often taken as characteristic of the Victorian habit of making one good stock stretch across a whole household dinner.