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To Dress Cucumbers Raw
Gather early in the morning, peel, lay in cold water till just before dinner. Then drain, slice as thin as possible into ice water, which drain and then fill a dish with alternate layers of sliced cucumber and thinly sliced white onion, sprinkled with salt and pepper. Pour a cup of weak vinegar over it and lay a lump of ice on top.--Mrs. S. T.
A cold cucumber-and-onion salad from the era before refrigeration, when the whole point was to get the vegetables as cold as possible and keep them there. Almost every instruction here is about temperature.
- The hinge: keep it cold and crispThe repeated soaking in cold and then ice water is the recipe. Sliced cucumber goes limp within the hour at room temperature, so slice into a bowl of ice water, drain hard, and assemble at the last minute.
- Slice as thin as possibleA mandoline or the thin slot of a box grater gets closer to the intended near-translucent slices than a knife will. Uniform thinness is what lets the vinegar penetrate in the few minutes before serving.
- "Weak vinegar"Nineteenth-century household vinegar was not standardized and varied in strength, and the recipe's own "weak" signals something milder than today's 5 percent cider vinegar. Cut modern vinegar with an equal part water, or use about a cup of the diluted mixture for two large cucumbers.
- A cup is a cupRead the cup as roughly our 8 ounces; period cups were not standardized, so the figure is approximate. The volume here is a dressing to pour off, not to absorb, so precision hardly matters.
- The lump of iceThis did double duty, chilling the dish and slowly watering down the vinegar as it melted. Chilling the serving bowl beforehand and refrigerating the assembled salad for fifteen minutes accomplishes the same thing without a puddle.
- White onionA sweet onion or a mild white onion sliced paper-thin is closest to the intent. If yours is sharp, rinse the slices in cold water and drain before layering.
- SaltingSalt draws water out fast. Sprinkle lightly between the layers just before the vinegar goes on rather than in advance, or the crispness the ice water bought you is lost.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities; as a guide, two cucumbers and one small onion will make four to six side servings. Serve with a slotted spoon and leave the accumulated liquid behind.
Raw cucumbers were regarded with some suspicion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- Samuel Johnson's often-quoted line about cucumbers being best sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out reflects a common belief that they were indigestible. Soaking, salting and heavy acid dressing recur often enough in printed receipts to look like a common defense against that reputation, and they persisted in cookbooks long after the medical worry faded. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of such short, initialed recipes; the instruction to gather cucumbers early in the morning assumes a kitchen garden a few steps from the door, and the lump of ice assumes an icehouse or a delivery, both markers of a comfortable household in the years after the Civil War.