Home › The Principles of Cookery › Garnish, Cucumber For
Garnish, Cucumber For
Peel the cucumber and slice it; keep scooping out the seeds as it is cut down. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a saucepan, with two table-spoonfuls of lemon-juice, a little salt and pepper, and a lump of sugar. Let the ingredients stew slowly until sufficiently cooked, then strain off the butter, pour over them a little good white sauce, and serve with steak, cutlets, etc. Time to stew; twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient, one moderate-sized cucumber, with half a pint of sauce, for two pounds of cutlets.
A stewed cucumber garnish of the kind Victorian cooks banked around a dish of cutlets. It is straightforward, but the measurements are pre-metric and the cucumber itself is not the vegetable the book had in mind.
- Butter the size of a large eggRoughly 2 oz, or 55 g — about half a stick. It is a cooking medium here rather than an ingredient in the finished dish, since it is strained off before serving.
- A lump of sugarA Victorian loaf-sugar lump was roughly a teaspoonful of granulated, though lump sizes varied. Its job is to take the edge off the lemon juice, not to sweeten.
- Half a pint of sauceAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml — a generous quantity for one cucumber, and enough to dress two pounds of cutlets as stated. A 'good white sauce' in this period would normally have been a flour-thickened sauce of the bechamel or veloute type rather than a flourless cream reduction, though the book does not specify.
- The cucumber has changedCucumbers of the period were generally thicker-skinned and seedier than modern varieties, which is presumably why the recipe has you keep scooping as you slice. A modern seedless or English cucumber needs peeling and slicing only, with a quick pass of a teaspoon down the centre if the seeds are at all developed.
- Draw out the water firstThe hinge of the dish. Cucumber is over 95 per cent water, and if it is not salted and drained for twenty minutes before it goes in the pan, it will flood the butter and boil rather than stew. Pat the slices dry before cooking.
- Twenty minutes is right, but keep it slowThe word is stew: the lowest heat, covered, so the slices turn translucent and yielding without collapsing. Over a brisk flame they will be grey mush well before twenty minutes are up.
- YieldOne medium cucumber gives enough garnish for four modest plates, or two pounds of cutlets as the book has it.
Cucumbers were eaten hot far more often in Britain than they are now — stewed, stuffed, fried in batter, or made into soup — in part because the raw vegetable had a long-standing reputation as cold and indigestible, and cooking was thought to correct it. Cassell's places this under garnishes rather than vegetables, which tells you its intended role: a soft, faintly sharp accompaniment ranged around a platter of grilled meat, in the same family as the cucumber served with salmon or with lamb. The lemon juice and sugar are doing the work of a modern pickle, brightening a dish that is otherwise butter and white sauce. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the later nineteenth century as a vast alphabetical reference for middle-class households, routinely gives a probable cost — one shilling here — a figure aimed squarely at a cook working to a weekly budget.