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Cucumbers Fried in Batter
Pare the cucumbers, cut into slices about a sixteenth of an inch thick. Dredge them with salt and pepper. Beat one egg until light, add to it a half pint of milk, a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, one and a half cups of sifted flour. Beat until smooth. Dip the pieces of cucumber in this batter and drop, one at a time, into smoking hot fat. The fat must be deep enough to float them. When brown and crisp on one side, turn and fry brown on the other. Lift with a skimmer, as turning with a fork makes them heavy. Drain on brown paper and serve as an accompaniment to boiled or panned steak.
A straightforward fritter batter, but cucumbers are mostly water and that is the whole problem the technique is working around. Two details in the original — the salting and the skimmer — matter more than they look.
- Salt the slices first, then dry themThe dredging with salt is not only seasoning; it pulls water out of the slices. Let them sit ten minutes, then blot them thoroughly dry before battering, or the coating will slide off and the fat will spit.
- A sixteenth of an inch is very thinThat is about 1.5 mm, mandoline territory. Cut by hand at an eighth of an inch and the fritters hold together better while still cooking through.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With one egg and a cup and a half of flour this gives a thick coating batter, closer to pancake batter than tempura; thin it with a spoonful more milk if it sits on the slices in a heavy blanket.
- "Smoking hot fat"A workable modern reading is roughly 365-375F, though the book gives no temperature. Rendered lard and drippings generally smoke lower than modern refined oils, so waiting for visible smoke today risks overheating the oil. Use a thermometer and fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The skimmer instruction is realPiercing a fritter with a fork lets fat into the interior and steam out, which is probably what the author means by "heavy." A spider or slotted spoon does the job.
- Brown paperBrown paper was a common drain in period kitchens. Paper towels over a rack work better; a rack alone keeps the underside crisp.
- Panned steakPeriod usage for steak cooked in a hot frying pan rather than over coals — a pan-seared steak.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of cucumbers or yield; as a rough estimate, this much batter will coat two medium cucumbers, enough for four as a side. Fry to order; they soften within a few minutes of leaving the fat.
Cooked cucumbers were far more ordinary in the nineteenth century than they are now — stewed, stuffed, fried, or made into a mock-fish dish. A batter fritter was one of the standard proofs that any vegetable, properly dried and correctly fried, could hold its own on the plate. The pairing with steak reflects the era's habit of serving a fried vegetable as a crisp accompaniment rather than a course of its own.