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CUCUMBERS (a la Creme)
Peel two cucumbers as thinly as possible; split each in two lengthways and remove the seeds; then cut the pieces into cubes of equal size. Cook them in salted water for fifteen minutes, take up, and drain on a sieve. Put the cooked cucumber in a stewpan with one ounce of butter, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, add a tea-spoonful of castor sugar and half a gill of cream, and bring to the boil, shaking the pan well. Dish up, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over, and serve hot. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A straightforward vegetable side from the era when cucumber was as often cooked as eaten raw. The whole dish turns on not letting the cucumber collapse into water.
- The hinge: cut down the boilingFifteen minutes in salted water will leave modern thin-skinned cucumbers waterlogged and falling apart. Three to five minutes is enough to take the raw edge off; they should still hold their cube shape when drained.
- Drain hardCucumber is around 95 per cent water, and any that clings will thin the cream into a puddle. Leave the cubes on the sieve several minutes and blot them before they go into the pan.
- Half a gillAn Imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is 2½ fl oz — a scant third of a cup of cream. Use double or heavy cream; single cream may split when boiled.
- StewpanA straight-sided pan with a lid; any sauté pan or saucepan wide enough to hold the cubes in a shallow layer will do. The shaking is there to coat the cucumber without stirring it to mush.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar; ordinary granulated dissolves fine in hot cream. The teaspoon is a seasoning rather than a sweetener, and may be intended to balance the flavour of the cooked cucumber.
- Choice of cucumberTwo cucumbers in a British book of this date most likely means the long forcing-house sort, close to a modern English cucumber; two would serve about four. If using shorter American slicing cucumbers, you may want three, and the seed core is worth removing generously.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and go light — a few rasps. Pre-ground nutmeg in quantity will dominate a dish this delicate.
- The cost note1s. 3d. is Victorian shorthand for the probable price of making the dish, not a measurement. Cassell's attaches a probable cost to most of its recipe entries.
The cucumber reached the British table as a cooked vegetable at least as often as a raw one — stewed, stuffed, or dressed in a white sauce, and frequently paired with lamb or salmon. The suspicion that raw cucumber was indigestible was widespread in the nineteenth century and lingers in the period's cookery writing; boiling and creaming were the respectable treatment. À la crème is simply the French kitchen's label for a vegetable finished in cream, and the formula here — blanch, drain, reheat in butter and cream with salt, pepper and nutmeg — is the same one Victorian cooks applied to spinach, celery, onions and cauliflower. The pinch of sugar and the grating of nutmeg are the tells of a book written when French technique was being translated wholesale for English middle-class households.