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Stuffed Cucumbers
Wash a half dozen large cucumbers, split them lengthwise, and with a teaspoon carefully scoop out the seeds. Mix one cup of bread crumbs with a tablespoonful of melted butter, and season highly with salt and cayenne. Fill the cucumbers with this mixture, place the two halves together, fasten them with small wooden tooth picks, or they may be tied with twine, place them in a baking pan and bake in a moderate oven a half hour. Serve with English Drawn Butter Sauce,
A plain stuffed vegetable that depends entirely on managing the water in the cucumber and on the sauce served over it. Everything else is bread crumbs and seasoning.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period usage for "moderate" ranges about 325-375F). Half an hour at that heat should leave the cucumber tender but still holding its shape; much longer and the halves are likely to slump.
- Drain the shells firstAfter scooping the seeds, salt the hollows lightly and stand them cut side down on a rack for 20 to 30 minutes, then blot dry. Cucumbers are well over 90 percent water and the recipe gives it nowhere to go, so undrained shells stew in their own liquid.
- Which cucumbersThe large field cucumbers of the period had thick skins and coarse seeds worth removing. Standard waxed supermarket cucumbers should be peeled; thin-skinned English or Persian types can be left unpeeled but give you very little cavity to fill.
- Bread crumbsUse dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones. One cup of dry crumbs with a single tablespoon of butter is a stiff, sandy filling by modern taste — two to three tablespoons, or a few spoonfuls of stock, binds it without making it pasty.
- Season highly with cayenneStart with a scant eighth teaspoon for the cup of crumbs and taste the raw mixture before filling; the filling is the only seasoned element in the dish.
- FasteningWooden toothpicks work, or tie the halves at both ends with kitchen twine as the recipe allows. Set the cucumbers in the pan so they brace one another and the seam stays closed.
- English drawn butter sauceNot clarified butter. In this period drawn butter is a light flour-and-butter roux let down with water or stock and finished with more butter — essentially a plain white sauce made on water rather than milk. Without it the dish is dry.
- YieldSix large cucumbers, split, give twelve halves — six servings as a side dish, or four if it is the main vegetable at a summer supper.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the late nineteenth-century genre of summer cookery books, written for households with no refrigeration; the recipes lean on vegetables, cold sauces and short oven times. Cooking cucumbers rather than eating them raw was one common treatment through much of the century o be be indige— raw cucumber was widely held to be indigestible, and English and American books of the period stew, fry and stuff them as a matter of course, even as they also dress and serve them raw. Stuffed cucumbers follow the same pattern as stuffed marrow or stuffed onions: hollow a mild vegetable, fill it with seasoned crumbs, bake, and rely on a sauce to carry the flavour. Drawn butter, called for here, was the workhorse sauce of English and American kitchens before French veloutés and hollandaise displaced it, and it appears beside boiled fish, asparagus and vegetables throughout books of this era.