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Eggs and Cucumber
Put three ounces of butter into a stewpan, and let it dissolve. Peel, quarter, and cut into slices three small cucumbers, and shred some young onions; add these to the butter, flavour with pepper and salt, and half a table-spoonful of vinegar. When the mixture has simmered ten minutes, have ready slices of six hard-boiled eggs, which warm up for two minutes longer, stirring in a table-spoonful of cream just before serving. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A simple stewed-cucumber dish that stands or falls on how much water the cucumbers throw off. The instructions are complete; only the vessel, the produce and the finish need translating.
- StewpanA lidded pan of saucepan type, straight-sided and often fairly shallow; a modern sauté pan or deep skillet will serve. Width helps here, since a crowded pan steams the cucumber instead of letting the liquid reduce.
- Three small cucumbersVictorian forcing-house cucumbers were long, thin and thin-skinned, closest to what is now sold as an English or Lebanese cucumber. Three small ones come to something in the region of a pound / 450 g before peeling and slicing. If using a thick-skinned ridge or field cucumber, seed it as well as peeling it.
- Draw off the water firstThe hinge of the dish. Salt the sliced cucumber for 15-20 minutes and pat it dry before it goes into the butter, or the ten minutes' simmering will produce a watery sauce rather than a glazed one.
- Young onionsSpring onions or scallions, green tops included — not shallots and not mature onions, which need far longer than ten minutes to lose their rawness.
- Three ounces of butterAbout 85 g, generous for a pound of cucumber but deliberate: the butter is the sauce. Two ounces makes a leaner dish without harming it.
- The eggsSix hard-boiled eggs sliced and warmed only two minutes. Longer and the whites turn rubbery and the yolks chalky. Fold them in off direct heat and stir as little as possible or the slices break up.
- The creamA tablespoonful of double or heavy cream, added off the heat. Its job is to bind the buttery pan juices, so do not let it boil after it goes in.
- Yield and servingThree or four as written, as a light supper or luncheon dish. Toast or plain boiled potatoes carry it; the vinegar means it wants no further acid.
Cucumbers were a glasshouse crop in Victorian Britain, forced under glass by market gardeners around London and available well outside the summer, which is why a book like Cassell's treats them as an everyday stewing vegetable rather than a salad novelty. Stewing them in butter with a little vinegar is one of the treatments the period books offer — cucumbers were widely thought indigestible raw, and cooking with an acid is often said to have been the remedy. The dish belongs to the large class of Victorian egg suppers: cheap, quick, made from what the larder held, and set down in the book with a costing (1s. 2d.) so a housekeeper could judge it against the week's budget. The stated price is a moderate one, and the pairing of hard-boiled eggs with a buttery stewed vegetable recurs throughout nineteenth-century English cookery, from eggs with spinach to eggs with sorrel.