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Cucumbers Fried in Batter
Pare three cucumbers, cut them in slices about one-sixteenth of an inch thick, dredge them with salt and pepper, and let them lie fifteen minutes. Beat one egg (the white and yolk together) until light; add to it a half pint of milk, a halfteaspoonful of salt, two dashes of black pepper and a cup and a half of sifted flour; beat until smooth. Dip the pieces of cucumbers into this batter, and fry in smoking hot fat or oil. The fat must be deep enough to float them. When done, take them out with a skimmer (piercing them with a fork will make them fall), drain them on brown paper, and serve very hot.
STEWED CUCUMBERS No. I 6 cucumbers 1 tablespoonful of butter 1/2 pint of stock or water No. 1 I small onion 1 tablespoonful of flour Salt and pepper to taste Pare the cucumbers, cut them in quarters, remove the seeds. Put the butter into a frying pan, add to it the onion cut in slices, fry until brown, then add the cucumbers, and fry carefully until a light brown; take them out with a slice, add the flour to the butter remaining in the pan, mix until smooth; add the stock, stir continually until it boils, add the salt and pepper, then the cucumbers, and stew gently for twenty minutes. Serve on squares of toasted bread.
Two cucumber dishes, both built on the older assumption that cucumber is a vegetable to be cooked rather than a salad. A few conversions and one timing to reconsider.
- Slice thicknessOne-sixteenth of an inch is thinner than most cooks can manage with a knife and the slices collapse under the batter. An eighth of an inch, or the second-thinnest setting on a mandoline, holds its shape and still cooks through.
- The salting step is the hingeFifteen minutes under salt pulls out a surprising amount of water. Drain that liquid off and blot the slices dry before battering, or the batter will slide away in the fat.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With one egg and a cup and a half of flour this gives a thick coating batter; thin it with a spoonful or two more milk if it sits on the slices in lumps.
- "Smoking hot fat"In modern terms roughly 350-375F. Fat actually smoking is past its useful point and will taste scorched; use an oil with a high smoke point and check with a thermometer.
- DrainingBrown paper means unbleached wrapping or grocery-bag paper. A wire rack over a tray keeps the underside crisp better than any paper does.
- Stewed cucumbers: the stock measureHalf a pint is one cup. "Take them out with a slice" means a slotted spatula or skimmer.
- Twenty minutes is too longEight to twelve minutes of gentle simmering leaves quartered, seeded cucumbers tender and intact; twenty tends to reduce them to pulp and thins the sauce with their released water.
- Which cucumberSeeded quarters of a large field cucumber are closest to what is intended. English or Persian cucumbers need no seeding and less time still.
- YieldThree cucumbers fried serve about four as a side; the six stewed cucumbers on toast serve about six.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American effort to plan summer cooking deliberately — light courses, little roasting, and vegetables treated as the centre of a meal rather than an afterthought. Cooked cucumber, which reads oddly now, was entirely standard: European kitchens had stewed, stuffed and fried cucumbers for centuries, and the raw slice in a bowl of vinegar was often regarded with suspicion, raw cucumber being widely blamed at the time for summer complaints. Frying vegetables in a milk-and-egg batter was applied more or less interchangeably to cucumber, eggplant, salsify and green tomato. The instruction not to pierce the fried slices with a fork is the kind of practical detail that suggests the recipe had been tested in a kitchen.