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Cucumbers, Stewed
Take two or three young fresh cucumbers. Peel them, and cut them into quarters lengthways, remove the seeds, dry them, dip them in flour, and fry them in hot butter till they are lightly browned. Lift them out with an eggslice, drain them, and put them into a saucepan with a tea-cupful of good brown gravy. Season with pepper and salt, and stew them gently until tender. Just before serving add a dessert-spoonful of chilli vinegar and a small lump of sugar. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for a moderate-sized dish.
A Victorian vegetable side that treats cucumber as a hot dish rather than a salad. The technique is sound; only the measures and the timing need translating.
- Dry the cucumber properlyThis is the hinge. Cucumber is mostly water, and unless the quarters are salted briefly or patted thoroughly dry, the flour will slide off and the pieces will steam rather than brown in the butter.
- A tea-cupfulA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug: reckon on 5 to 6 fl oz, about three-quarters of a cup. The gravy should barely cover the cucumber, not drown it.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, sitting between the teaspoon and the tablespoon in the old English set.
- Good brown gravyThe book means a proper meat-based sauce reduced from roast drippings or a brown stock, not a thin pan juice and not a granule mix. A well-reduced beef stock with a little butter-and-flour roux gets you there.
- Chilli vinegarA condiment common in the period: vinegar steeped with red chillies, with steeping times varying from days to several weeks depending on the source. Cider vinegar with a pinch of chilli flakes, or a splash of a plain hot pepper vinegar, does the same job of cutting the richness.
- Half an hour is longYoung cucumbers give up their structure quickly, and the recipe specifies young ones; ten to fifteen minutes of gentle stewing may well reach tender without collapse. The full half hour would suit thicker, coarser fruit.
- Choosing cucumbersCucumbers with developed seeds suit the method, since the recipe asks for the seeds to be removed. Modern seedless varieties need no seeding and cook faster still.
- Yield and serving"Sufficient for a moderate-sized dish" suggests a side for about four. The sugar and chilli vinegar added at the end give a sweet-sharp finish closer to a relish than a plain vegetable.
Stewed and fried cucumber was familiar in English cookery long before it looked odd: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery books treat the cucumber as a vegetable to be dressed hot as well as sliced raw, and older dietary thinking held raw cucumber to be cold and hard to digest. The recipe is priced at 1s. 2d. and calls for "good brown gravy", a sauce a well-run kitchen would expect to have to hand. Chilli vinegar and a lump of sugar at the finish reflect the period taste for a sweet-sharp lift at the end of a rich sauce, the same instinct behind the era's bottled ketchups and store sauces.