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To Dress Cucumbers
Pare the cucumber and cut it into thin slices. Sprinkle a little salt over, and in a few minutes drain off the water which exudes. Put the slices on a clean dish, and pour over a French dressing. Many persons like a few slices of onion served with the cucumber, or 1 teaspoonful of the vinegar in which onions have been pickled may be added to the other vinegar.
A plain salad of sliced cucumber in vinaigrette, from the era when cucumbers were watery, thick-skinned and full of seed. Most of the technique here still holds; the ingredient has changed more than the method.
- The hinge: salt and drainSalting draws out water so the dressing is not diluted into a puddle. A few minutes is the minimum; 20 to 30 minutes in a colander gives noticeably crisper, better-seasoned slices. Pat dry before dressing and go light on any further salt.
- French dressing, 1900 senseFrench dressing, older sense -- In household books of this general period a French dressing usually meant oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, with oil in the greater proportion (the ratio varies from book to book). It is not the sweet orange bottled product sold under that name in the United States today.
- Whether to peelThe instruction to pare assumes a field cucumber with tough, sometimes bitter skin. English and Persian cucumbers need no peeling and have little seed; if using a waxed supermarket cucumber, peel it as written.
- Slice thicknessThin means close to translucent. A mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater gives the even, near-transparent slices the dish depends on for texture.
- The pickled-onion vinegarThe recipe offers a teaspoon of the liquor from a jar of pickled onions as an optional way to get onion flavour without raw onion bite. Any mild pickle brine or a splash of good cider vinegar does the same job.
- Serve cold and soonDressed cucumber slumps within the hour. Dress just before the dish goes to the table and keep it chilled until then.
- YieldOne large cucumber will serve about four as a side salad; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Cucumber dressed with vinegar is a long-established way of handling the vegetable in English cooking. The salting step removes water and, with older varieties, some bitterness; older writers also treated raw cucumber as cold, damp and hard to digest, though that is humoral tradition rather than a documented reason for the salting. Many nineteenth-century books recommend salting and draining, and Victorian gardeners prized the long, straight forcing-house cucumber. The pickled-onion vinegar suggestion assumes a well-stocked pickle shelf and treats leftover brine as a seasoning rather than waste.