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Sauce Crême de Concombres
(Cucumber Cream Sauce.) Ingredients.
One small Cucumber.
Half a Carrot. A piece of Bayleaf. A few sprigs of Parsley. Grated Nutmeg. Half a pint of White Stock.
One gill of Milk.
One ounce and a half of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
A small Onion.
The book prints the ingredient list only, leaving the method to the reader's training: this is a small white roux sauce finished with cucumber. The quantities are imperial and the proportions tell you most of what you need.
- The measures are imperialHalf a pint of white stock is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups; one gill is 5 fl oz, about ⅔ cup. Together with 1½ oz butter and 1 oz flour that gives a fairly slack sauce, thinned further by the water in the cucumber.
- No method is givenSweat the peeled, seeded, chopped cucumber and the onion in the butter, stir in the flour, cook without colour, then add the stock and milk by degrees. Simmer until the cucumber is soft and pass through a sieve.
- Keep the roux whiteAny colour in the butter and flour, or any browning of the onion, will spoil both the pale tint and the delicate flavour the sauce exists for.
- White stockIn a book of this date that means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned and not reduced to a glaze. An unsalted low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- The onion is a flavouring, not a bodyA "small onion" here is for perfume only. Leave it whole or halved and lift it out before sieving if you want the cucumber to dominate; chop it if you want a rounder, more soup-like sauce.
- Cucumber varietiesThe forcing-house cucumbers of the period were long and thin-skinned. With a modern cucumber it is worth salting the chopped flesh for ten minutes and draining it before it goes into the butter, so the sauce is not thinned.
- Yield and servingAbout 1½ cups, enough for four to six portions. A sauce of this kind suits poached salmon or salmon trout, and would also go with turbot or boiled chicken.
An English cookery book of the period wrote its sauces in French, and the naming here follows the classical system: a white sauce built on stock and milk, given a single dominant flavouring, then named for it. Cucumber and salmon is a familiar British fish pairing, usually met as raw slices in vinegar; turning the cucumber into a hot sieved sauce belongs to the professional kitchen rather than the family table, and needed the year-round glasshouse cucumbers that Victorian market gardening supplied in quantity. The absence of any method is characteristic of the genre, in which so many entries are little more than a list of proportions.