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Cucumbers, with Onions
Peel the cucumbers and cut them into quarters; take out all the seeds, cut each quarter into three pieces, and pare them round. Peel as many small onions as you have pieces of cucumber; put them into a marinade of vinegar and water (half of each), pepper and salt, for two hours. Then take them out of the marinade, put them into a saucepan, add as much stock as will barely cover them, boil them down to a glaze; add a little rich brown gravy, boil a few minutes, add the juice of a lemon and a little sugar. This is a good accompaniment to mutton or veal cutlets. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian hot vegetable garnish rather than a salad: cucumber and button onions cooked down in stock until glazed, then sharpened with lemon. The technique is straightforward, but two or three of the instructions assume a professional kitchen.
- "Pare them round"This means turning the cucumber pieces — trimming the edges with a small knife into smooth barrel or olive shapes so they cook evenly and look uniform. It is cosmetic, and skipping it costs you nothing but appearance.
- The onions"Small onions" here are button or pearl onions, roughly an inch across. Frozen peeled pearl onions work; if using fresh, a brief blanch makes peeling far quicker.
- Marinade timingTwo hours in half vinegar, half water seasons the vegetables and firms the cucumber; longer soaking risks softening it. Drain well before it goes into the pan, or the finished dish will be sour.
- "Boil them down to a glaze"The hinge of the recipe. Reduce the stock uncovered until it is a syrupy film coating the vegetables — a few tablespoons at most. Stop before it colours; a glaze that catches turns bitter and the cucumber will collapse if you keep it over heat chasing reduction.
- "Rich brown gravy"Here this means a well-reduced brown gravy or sauce of the roast-juices or espagnole type, not gravy from granules. A few spoonfuls of good beef or veal stock reduced hard, or a demi-glace, gives the right body.
- Cucumber choiceVictorian frame cucumbers were large and thick-skinned, which may be part of why the recipe peels and seeds them. A modern English cucumber can be treated the same way; small ridge or Persian cucumbers can be halved and seeded instead of quartered.
- Sugar and lemonAdd both off the boil and taste as you go. The quantities are meant to balance the vinegar left in the vegetables, and that varies with how well you drained them — start with a teaspoon of sugar and half the lemon.
- Yield and costThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly two medium cucumbers with a matching number of button onions (about a pound) would serve four as a garnish alongside cutlets. The "probable cost, 1s" is a Victorian shilling, a figure Cassell's gives throughout to help a household budget; it has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Hot cucumber, stewed or glazed, was a standard English accompaniment to lamb and veal through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the pairing of cucumber with mutton is old enough that Hannah Glasse and her contemporaries treat it as obvious. The cooked cucumber has largely fallen out of British and American kitchens, which now think of it as a raw salad vegetable, but the glazing method here is simply the standard treatment for glazed onions or turnips applied to a summer crop. Cassell's places the recipe among the vegetable accompaniments of a period when large frame cucumbers grown under glass were plentiful enough in season to be cooked rather than saved for the salad bowl.