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Some Kitchen Kinks: Cucumbers
MISCELLANEOUS VEGETABLES a Cucumbers. The cucumber is much oftener eaten in the United States as a salad than cooked, yet it is a very palatable vegetable when stewed and served with a white sauce, or seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper, and served on toast. The pared and quartered cucumber should be cooked until tender in boiling salted water, which will require about fifteen minutes, and then served as directed. Cucumbers may also be cut in slices lengthwise and fried like summer squash or eggplant.
Stewed Cucumbers.
Stew pared cucumbers, cut in quarters or in thick slices, for fifteen minutes in a saucepan with a little water and a minced shallot or a small minced onion. Pour off the water; stir in a little flour, butter, and salt; heat for two or three minutes, and then serve.
Cucumber Sauté.
Boil pared and quartered cucumbers for three minutes only. Then drain the pieces and season with salt and pepper. Roll in flour and cook in a saucepan with butter for twenty minutes. This dish may be varied by adding minced parsley, chives, and chervil about five minutes before the cooking is finished.
Three related methods for cooked cucumber, written when the vegetable was still treated as a hot dish as often as a salad. The instructions are sound, though the timings assume a firmer, thicker-skinned cucumber than most supermarkets sell.
- Which cucumberField or slicing cucumbers of the period generally had tougher skins, larger seeds and denser flesh than a modern English or hothouse cucumber, which is likely why paring is specified and why fifteen minutes of boiling was reasonable. A modern hothouse cucumber is thinner-walled and more watery; it may be tender in six to eight minutes, and the seed core can be scooped out with a spoon before cooking.
- Salt first, if you have timeThe single thing that improves all three dishes is drawing off water. Salt the pared, quartered pieces, leave them in a colander twenty to thirty minutes, then pat dry. Otherwise stewed cucumber releases enough liquid to thin the sauce and sautéed cucumber steams rather than browns.
- "Saucepan" means the pan, not the dishThroughout this era a saucepan is simply a lidded pot on the stovetop. Nothing here goes into the oven.
- The flour in stewed cucumbersStirring raw flour into the drained pieces with butter makes a rough pan sauce rather than a smooth white sauce. Two or three minutes is the minimum to cook out the starch taste; adding a splash of milk or the reserved cooking water gives a better result and is consistent with the "white sauce" mentioned in the opening note.
- Cucumber sauté timingTwenty minutes in butter over any real heat will scorch the flour coating. Keep it at a bare medium-low, moving the pieces, and treat twenty minutes as an upper limit — the cucumber is already blanched and needs only to colour and soften.
- Fines herbesThe parsley, chives and chervil added at the end are the classic French trio minus tarragon. Chervil is the one you may have to grow or skip; a little tarragon or dill stands in without falsifying the dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, allow about one medium cucumber per person as a side dish, and more for a serving on toast. All three preparations are best served immediately, as cooked cucumber slumps and weeps as it sits.
Cooked cucumber sounds odd to modern American cooks precisely because of the shift this passage documents: by the early twentieth century the raw sliced cucumber, salted and dressed with vinegar, was much oftener eaten than the cooked kind in the United States, and the author feels obliged to argue for the stove. In English and French kitchens the vegetable had long been stewed, braised in butter or stuffed, and the cucumber sautes a French domestic recipe carried into an American household manual, though the resemblance is not evidence of any direct transmission. The pairing of cucumber with a white sauce and toast is also suggestive of the invalid and supper cookery often associated with the period, when mild stewed vegetables on toast are said to have been common light-meal fare. The instruction to pare is not fussiness hen ssold bore little resemblance to the slender greenhouse varieties sold alongside them today.