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Cucumber, Boiled
Peel a cucumber, but do not take out the seeds, cut it into convenient pieces for serving, and put into boiling water with a little salt. Boil for twenty minutes, then drain, and cover with white sauce. Probable cost, 6d.
A Victorian vegetable side that treats cucumber as a hot dish rather than a salad. The main adjustment is time: twenty minutes will collapse a modern cucumber into water.
- Cut the boiling timeThe cucumbers of the period were often ridge-grown, thicker-skinned and coarser than what we buy now, and Victorian taste ran to thoroughly softened vegetables. A modern greenhouse or English cucumber is tender in 4 to 6 minutes and turns to grey mush at twenty. Test with the point of a knife and pull it out while the pieces still hold their shape.
- Choose the right cucumberLook for the largest, firmest specimen you can find, ideally slightly overgrown, and cut it into thick batons or 2-inch lengths. Thin-skinned baby cucumbers have too little flesh to survive boiling.
- The seedsThe instruction to leave them in only works with a young cucumber. If the seed cavity is large and watery, scoop it out with a teaspoon or the finished dish will thin the sauce.
- Drain properlyCucumber holds a great deal of water. After draining, leave the pieces in the colander for a few minutes, or return them to the dry hot pan for thirty seconds, before saucing.
- White saucePresumably a plain flour-and-butter white sauce: about 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg. Make it while the cucumber cooks, and bear in mind that a wet cucumber will loosen it.
- "Probable cost, 6d."Sixpence in old currency, a price note Cassell's attached to most entries so a housekeeper could budget. It has no bearing on cooking.
- YieldOne large cucumber with sauce should serve three or four as a side dish; the recipe gives no quantity.
Hot cucumber was unremarkable in nineteenth-century British cookery, where the vegetable was as likely to be stewed, stuffed or served in sauce as eaten raw. Ridge cucumbers grown outdoors or under frames were seasonal and often reached the kitchen large and seedy, which suited them better to the pot than the salad bowl, and boiling with white sauce was a treatment commonly said to have been applied to mild vegetables in a household repertoire built on flour-and-butter sauces. The habit faded in Britain across the twentieth century as year-round imported salad cucumbers, thin-skinned and bred for crispness, replaced the older field varieties, though stewed and braised cucumber survives in French and Central European cooking.