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Cucumber Sauce, White
Peel a large cucumber, cut it into small pieces, and take out the pips. Simmer the pieces gently in a little salt and water until quite tender, then drain them, and stew them for a few minutes longer in good white sauce, in which they must be served. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. for half a pint. Sufficient for a small dish.
A straightforward Victorian accompaniment sauce: cucumber softened in salted water, then finished in béchamel. Two details govern the result — how far you cook the cucumber, and how thin the white sauce is.
- The white sauce"Good white sauce" here means a béchamel-type sauce: roughly 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour cooked together, then whisked with half a pint (10 fl oz) of milk, or milk and light stock. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon.
- Don't overcook the cucumber"Quite tender" is best read as yielding but still holding its shape, though period vegetable cookery often went further. Simmering pieces in salted water takes about 5–8 minutes; the recipe's half-hour presumably covers making the sauce as well. Cucumber pushed past tender collapses into water and thins the sauce.
- Drain properlyCucumber is over 95 percent water. Drain the pieces well and let them steam dry in the colander for a minute or two, or the finished sauce will loosen as it sits.
- "Pips"The seeds and the soft seed-bed. Halve the peeled cucumber lengthways and scoop the centre out with a teaspoon. Modern greenhouse and Persian cucumbers have far less seed than the ridge cucumbers of the period; with those, skip this step.
- Cost and quantity"1s. for half a pint" is a shilling for half a pint (10 fl oz) of finished sauce — a period price note, not an instruction. The recipe itself says only that it is "sufficient for a small dish".
- What to serve it withThe book gives no pairing. Sauces of this sort were commonly served with boiled or poached fish, such as salmon and turbot, and with boiled mutton or lamb. It also suits poached chicken.
- ServingKeep it warm over hot, not boiling, water and use it within half an hour. Reheating a flour-thickened sauce that holds watery vegetable pieces tends to break the texture.
Cucumber was treated as a cooked vegetable far more often in the nineteenth century than it is now — stewed, stuffed, fried in batter, or served in sauce like this. Part of the reason was botanical caution: raw cucumber had a long-standing reputation as cold and indigestible, and cooking it was thought to make it wholesome. Part was simply that the ridge cucumbers grown outdoors in Britain were larger, seedier and more bitter than the thin-skinned varieties sold today, and benefited from peeling, seeding and softening. Cassell's gives the sauce in a "white" version here, and the same vegetable was also worked into brown sauce for meat; pairs of white and brown variants run all through the dictionary.