Home › Salads and Dressings › Cucumber Salad
Cucumber Salad
2 young cucumbers, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar, 4 tablespoonfuls of oil, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, ¼ teaspoonful of pepper.
Pare and slice the cucumbers very thin, throw them into cold water one hour, drain and dry. Do not, on any consideration, add salt to the water in which they are soaked. When ready to serve put them in a salad bowl, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Mix well the oil and vinegar, pour them over and serve at once.
Sliced cucumbers should always accompany the fish course.
A plain oil-and-vinegar cucumber salad from the era when cucumbers were routinely soaked before dressing. Most of the technique still holds; a few assumptions behind it no longer do.
- The hinge: dress at the last momentSalt and dressing draw water out of cut cucumber within minutes, thinning the vinaigrette and slackening the slices. Mix and serve immediately, as the recipe insists.
- The cold soakAn hour in cold water crisps the slices and was also thought to leach bitterness from older varieties. Modern greenhouse and Persian cucumbers are bred without that bitterness, so a 15–20 minute soak in ice water is plenty, and can be skipped if the cucumbers are freshly cut.
- Why no salt in the waterThe instruction is not superstition. Salted water pulls moisture out by osmosis and leaves the slices limp, which is the opposite of what the soak is for.
- Drying mattersWet slices dilute the dressing and it slides off. Spin or pat them thoroughly dry between towels before they go into the bowl.
- ParingThe recipe says to pare, and peeling was usual for the thicker-skinned cucumbers of the period. Thin-skinned varieties need not be peeled; if using a standard waxed supermarket cucumber, peel it.
- The ratioFour parts oil to one part vinegar is sharper in effect than it sounds, since the cucumber releases its own water. Use a mild olive oil or a neutral oil and a wine or cider vinegar.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; two cucumbers, thinly sliced, will serve about four as a side. Scale the dressing at roughly one tablespoon of vinegar per two cucumbers.
Cucumbers had a long-standing reputation as cold, watery and hard to digest — Samuel Johnson repeated, as recorded by Boswell, a common saying of physicians that a cucumber should be dressed with pepper and vinegar and then thrown out — and the elaborate soaking, draining and drying here is a remnant of that anxiety as much as a matter of texture. The instruction that sliced cucumbers "should always accompany the fish course" reflects the fixed course order of late nineteenth-century dinner service, where certain accompaniments were treated as settled convention rather than choice; cucumber with salmon, and later with boiled or fried fish generally, was one of them. The dressing itself is simply a French vinaigrette.