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Concombre Farcie
(Stuffed Cucumber.) Take a cucumber and cut it in pieces about two inches long. Take out the centre with a cutter and fill it up with sausage-meat. Braise the cucumber slowly for about twenty minutes.
Dish the pieces up on croûtons of fried bread brushed over with glaze. Have some round pieces of ham and truffle and put on as lids, and pour brown sauce (white, if liked) round. This makes a pretty dish if served with tomato au gratin.
A late-Victorian garnish dish written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: it assumes you already have stock, glaze and brown sauce standing by. The hinge is the braise — the cucumber must cook gently in liquid, not dry in a pan, or the flesh collapses before the meat is done.
- Braising liquid, which the recipe omits"Braise slowly" here means setting the filled barrels upright in a buttered pan with stock or a light gravy coming a third of the way up, covered, over low heat. Without liquid the sausage-meat scorches and the cucumber turns to mush.
- Cucumber choiceUse a thick, straight cucumber — a field or ridge cucumber rather than a slim English one — so the walls survive hollowing. Cut 2-inch lengths, core with an apple corer or a plain round cutter, and peel if the skin is tough. Salting the cut pieces for 15 minutes and blotting them draws out water and firms the flesh.
- Twenty minutes is for the meat, not the clockPork sausage-meat packed into a 2-inch barrel needs an internal 160F. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer usually gets there, but check with a thermometer; the cucumber will be tender well before the centre of the filling is.
- Sausage-meatPlain bulk pork sausage, or squeezed from sausage links, works. Nineteenth-century sausage-meat was often seasoned with sage, mace and pepper — taste your sausage and add mace or nutmeg if it is bland.
- Glaze"Glaze" is meat stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold, brushed on warm for shine. A tablespoon of good demi-glace or reduced stock does the same job on the croûtons.
- Brown sauceThe book means a brown sauce of the espagnole/demi-glace type: brown roux, brown stock, reduced and strained. A reduced beef stock thickened lightly with a brown roux is the practical substitute; for the white version the recipe allows, a velouté made with the braising liquid would suit.
- Truffle and ham lidsThe lids are decoration cut with a small plain cutter — a coin of cooked ham with a smaller disc of black truffle on top. Truffle here can be dropped without harming the dish; ham alone, or a round of blanched carrot, keeps the visual idea.
- Yield and place at tableOne large cucumber gives about five or six pieces, enough as a garnish for four to six plates or as a small warm entrée for three. It is a meat garnish, and it also stands alone with the tomato au gratin the author suggests.
Stuffed cucumber belongs to the vegetable-as-vessel tradition that ran through nineteenth-century French professional cookery, where cucumbers, celery hearts and cabbage were hollowed, farci and braised to give the garnish of a set-piece dish some shape and substance. The French title over an English text is typical of high-class household manuals, in which kitchens ran on French culinary vocabulary, so the cook was expected to read farcie, croûton and glaze without translation. Cucumbers were widely grown under glass in British kitchen gardens and often cooked rather than eaten raw — braised, stewed in gravy, or served in white sauce — a use that has largely dropped out of English cooking. The truffle lid tells you the intended household: a scrap of decoration valued for looking expensive on the plate rather than for the flavour it adds to a braise.