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Fried Cucumbers
Pare the cucumbers, cut them in slices about a quarter of an inch thick, season with salt and pepper. Dip first in egg, then in bread crumbs. Put two tablespoonfuls of lard or dripping in a frying pan with salt. Put in a few slices of cucumber, fry brown and crisp on one side, then turn and fry brown on the other. Lift carefully, drain on brown paper, serve very hot with tomato catsup.
A simple shallow-fry that lives or dies on moisture control: cucumber is over 95 percent water, and wet slices will steam the coating off rather than crisping it.
- Draw out the water firstSalt the slices and let them sit in a colander 20-30 minutes, then blot them dry before breading. The recipe's instruction to "season with salt" is doing this job implicitly, but the drain step is what makes the crust hold.
- Which cucumbersUse firm, small cucumbers with undeveloped seeds — Kirby or pickling types are ideal. Long English cucumbers are too watery and their seed cavity collapses in the pan.
- ParingWaxed supermarket cucumbers should be peeled as directed; unwaxed thin-skinned ones can keep their skin, which helps the slices hold together.
- Lard or drippingTwo tablespoonfuls is a shallow fry, not a deep one. Any fat with a high smoke point works — lard, beef dripping, or a neutral oil — heated to about 350-375F so the crumbs brown in two to three minutes a side.
- Salt in the panThe recipe adds salt to the frying fat; salt is sometimes said to reduce spattering. It does little, and salt in hot fat can scorch; salt the finished slices instead.
- Fry in batches"Put in a few slices" is deliberate. Crowding drops the fat temperature and the coating goes pale and greasy.
- Brown paperUnbleached kitchen paper or a wire rack over a sheet pan. A rack keeps the underside crisp, which paper does not.
- Yield and servingTwo medium cucumbers give roughly four side servings. They soften within minutes of leaving the pan, so serve immediately with the catsup on the side rather than over the top.
Fried cucumber turns up regularly in nineteenth-century American and English cookery, where cucumbers were treated as a vegetable to be cooked — stewed, stuffed, or fried — at least as often as eaten raw. The egg-and-crumb coating here is the standard Victorian "egg and bread crumb" treatment applied to everything from cutlets to oysters, and tomato catsup was a common accompaniment of the period, whether bottled or made at home.