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Cucumbers with Cream Sauce
6 cucumbers, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of milk, Salt and pepper to taste, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Pare the cucumbers, cut into quarters, remove the seeds, lay them in cold water for thirty minutes. Then put them in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, boil thirty minutes. When done, lift them carefully with a skimmer and place them in a vegetable dish. Put half the butter in a saucepan ; when melted, add the flour, mix until smooth, add the milk; stir continually until it boils, add the salt and pepper, take from the fire. Stir in the remaining quantity of butter, pour over the cucumbers and serve garnished with squares of fried bread.
A plain white sauce over hot cucumbers, from an era when the vegetable was more often cooked than eaten raw. The timings are the part that needs attention.
- Cut the boiling timeThirty minutes in salted water will reduce quartered cucumber to translucent pulp. Eight to twelve minutes, until just tender at the thickest point, holds the shape the recipe assumes when it says to lift them out carefully.
- Half a pint of milkIf the book is American, that is one cup (8 fl oz); a British half-pint would be 10 fl oz. Either way, one tablespoon of flour to that much milk gives a thin pouring sauce; use two tablespoons if you want it to cling.
- Seeds and skinThe instruction to pare and seed suggests thick-skinned cucumbers with developed seeds. English or Persian cucumbers need no seeding, and the thirty-minute cold-water soak, often said to firm the flesh and draw out bitterness, can be skipped.
- Salt twice, lightlyThere is a teaspoon of salt in the cooking water and more in the sauce. Season the sauce at the end, after tasting, or the dish comes out sharp.
- The butter off the heatThe second tablespoon of butter is stirred in after the pan leaves the fire, which is what gives the sauce its gloss; butter beaten into a sauce still at the boil is more likely to separate out.
- Drain properlyBoiled cucumber holds a great deal of water. Let the pieces sit a minute in the skimmer or on a cloth before dishing, or the sauce will thin out on the plate.
- Fried breadSmall squares of bread fried in butter until crisp, added at the table. Croutons from the bag go soft immediately in this sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; six cucumbers with a cup of sauce will serve about six as a side dish.
Nineteenth-century cooks treated the cucumber with suspicion in its raw state; it had a long reputation as cold and indigestible, and household writers frequently recommended boiling, stewing or frying it instead. Dressing it in a butter-and-flour cream sauce parallels the French concombres à la crème, and fried bread squares were a common finish of the period for soft vegetables served in a sauce, supplying the crunch the dish otherwise lacks. Cookery books of this kind often devoted whole chapters to vegetables, and the recipes lean heavily on long boiling and a white sauce, a habit later cooking has largely undone.