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CUCUMBERS (a la Poulette)
Peel two small, young cucumbers, remove the seeds, cut the fruit into pieces about one inch thick and two inches long, stew these till tender in water with a little salt and vinegar in it; drain them. Put into a stewpan one ounce of butter and three-quarters of an ounce of flour; mix the butter and flour well, and let them remain about three minutes. Add gradually one pint of nicely-flavoured stock. Simmer gently for fifteen minutes. Put in the cucumbers, with a seasoning of salt and pepper, and in a minute or so two table-spoonfuls of cream. Draw the sauce from the fire, and, just before serving it, add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and the juice of half a lemon. Time, one hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for one pint and a half.
A velouté-style white sauce finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison, with cucumber treated as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad ingredient. The finish is the part that goes wrong.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will scramble into curds. Take the pan off the heat, temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce, stir them back in, and serve at once; if it needs warming, use the lowest possible heat and stop when it coats a spoon.
- Butter and flour by weight1 oz butter to 3/4 oz flour is about 2 tablespoons butter to 3 tablespoons flour. Letting them "remain about three minutes" over gentle heat is cooking out the raw flour taste without colouring the roux.
- Stock quality is the whole dish"Nicely-flavoured stock" means a real veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned, since the sauce has almost nothing else in it. A salty commercial base will taste harsh once the liquid reduces and the yolks concentrate it.
- Cucumbers nowTwo small young cucumbers means two ridge or Lebanese-type cucumbers, not one long greenhouse cucumber. Modern varieties are less bitter and have finer seeds, so seeding is optional on small ones; peel regardless, as the skin stays tough and green in a pale sauce.
- Pre-cooking the cucumberSimmer in salted, lightly acidulated water only until a knife slides in without resistance, roughly 5 to 8 minutes. They finish cooking in the sauce, and overcooked cucumber collapses into water and thins the sauce.
- "Time, one hour"That is the total including preparation. Active cooking is about 25 minutes: 5 to 8 for the cucumber, 3 for the roux, 15 for the sauce.
- YieldA pint and a half by imperial measure is about 850 ml of finished dish, which serves four as a vegetable course or alongside boiled chicken or veal.
- Cost1s. 6d. is a period price, useful only as a rough indication of what the dish cost when the book was published; it does not convert meaningfully to modern money.
À la poulette names a French white sauce thickened with egg yolks and sharpened with lemon, counted among the velouté derivatives of the classical repertoire. The name is often said to point to poultry, since the sauce was habitually served with chicken, though it was applied freely to offal, mussels, and vegetables. Cassell's places it among cucumber dishes because Victorian cookery treated the cucumber as a proper vegetable to be stewed, fried, or stuffed rather than eaten only raw, an approach that survives in Eastern European and French provincial cooking but has largely dropped out of English kitchens. The entry also shows how thoroughly French sauce vocabulary had entered the late nineteenth-century English household dictionary, given without translation and assumed to need no explanation.