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Cucumbers, to Dress
Pare the cucumber and cut it into thin slices, or pare it round and round into ribands, leaving out the watery part. Sprinkle a little salt over them, and in a few minutes drain off the water which exudes. Put the slices on a clean dish, and pour a little oil and vinegar over them, and if necessary add a little more salt and pepper. Many persons like a few slices of onion served with the cucumber, or a tea-spoonful of the vinegar in which onions have been pickled may be added to the other vinegar. Probable cost, cucumbers 6d. each, when in full season.
A plain dressed cucumber salad of the sort that appeared beside cold meat at Victorian tables. Only a couple of details need translating.
- The salting is the whole pointCucumbers of the period were large, seedy and watery, and the salt-and-drain step keeps the dressing from turning to brine on the dish. Give it 15-20 minutes rather than "a few", then drain and pat dry; with modern thin-skinned varieties you can skip peeling but not salting.
- "Pare it round and round into ribands"A continuous spiral peel, cut with a knife or a swivel peeler, stopping when you reach the soft seedy centre — which is the "watery part" to be left out. A mandoline will produce thin slices faster, though not the same continuous ribbon.
- Oil and vinegar proportionsThe recipe gives none. Around three parts oil to one of vinegar is a reasonable modern working ratio, though period sources vary; a tablespoon of oil and a teaspoon of vinegar dresses one medium cucumber. Use a mild olive or sunflower oil, not a peppery extra-virgin, and a white wine or cider vinegar rather than malt.
- Onion pickle vinegarThe teaspoonful of vinegar from a jar of pickled onions is a genuinely good trick and still works — it carries salt, sugar and spice as well as acid. Reduce the plain vinegar by the same amount so the dressing does not go sharp.
- Season after dressingBecause the cucumbers have already been salted, taste before adding the "little more salt" the recipe allows. Pepper should be ground on at the last moment.
- YieldOne cucumber dressed this way serves three or four as a side salad. It does not keep — it weeps within the hour, so dress it just before it goes to the table.
- The price noteSixpence each "when in full season". Cucumbers in Britain were largely raised under glass or in frames, which kept them dearer than field vegetables. The probable cost itself is part of the book's standard format, supplied for entries throughout.
Dressed cucumber belongs to the long English tradition of treating the vegetable as something to be tamed rather than eaten raw and whole: Georgian and Victorian cookery books commonly salt and drain it first, and the old dietary suspicion of cucumbers as cold and indigestible sits behind the practice. The much-quoted quip reported by Boswell — presented there as an old saying rather than Johnson's own coinage — that a cucumber should be sliced and dressed with pepper and vinegar and then thrown out is often cited as evidence of that prejudice. In Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, whose date is not easily fixed and which is often confused with the earlier Dictionary of Cookery, cucumbers appear as a staple of the British market garden and glasshouse, and this entry sits in the reference-dictionary format the book uses throughout — a short working method, a note on the onion variation that "many persons like", and a probable cost for the housekeeper planning her week.