Home › Vegetables › Stewed Cucumbers
Stewed Cucumbers
1 tablespoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of stock, 1 tablespoonful of butter, I small onion, Salt and pepper to taste.
Pare the cucumbers, cut into quarters, remove the seeds. Put the butter in a frying pan, add the onion sliced, fry until brown; then add the cucumbers, shake them carefully until they are a light brown, then take them out carefully with an egg-slice. Add the flour to the butter remaining
A brown-butter sauté finished in a flour-thickened gravy. Note that the printed text breaks off mid-sentence, so the last steps have to be inferred from the method it sets up.
- The missing endingThe recipe stops at "Add the flour to the butter remaining." The standard completion is to cook the flour in the butter for a minute or two, stir in the stock to make a smooth sauce, season, return the cucumbers and simmer gently until tender. Nothing else in the ingredient list is left unaccounted for.
- Half a pint of stockIn an American book of this period that is one cup; in a British printing it would be 10 fluid ounces. Either amount makes a light gravy rather than a braising liquid, so keep the pan barely covered and add more stock only if it tightens too far.
- Quantity of cucumbersNone is given. Two or three large cucumbers, peeled, quartered and seeded, is roughly in proportion to one cup of sauce; treat the yield as a guess, since the original specifies neither.
- Egg-sliceA thin, slotted metal spatula, much like a fish slice. Used here because seeded cucumber quarters collapse easily once softened; lift rather than stir.
- Choose the right cucumberParing and seeding was routine in recipes of this kind, and older varieties are generally reckoned to have been thicker-skinned and seedier than modern ones. A modern English or field cucumber still benefits from both; small Persian or Kirby cucumbers can simply be halved.
- Draw off the water firstNot in the original, but salting the quartered cucumbers for 20 minutes and patting them dry makes the browning step actually work. Wet cucumber steams in the butter instead of colouring.
- Don't overcookTen to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer is enough. Cucumber goes from tender to translucent mush quickly, and there is no rescuing it once the flesh collapses.
- ServingMeant as a hot vegetable course alongside roast or boiled meat, particularly lamb and mutton. It is not a salad and does not improve on standing.
Cooked cucumber was ordinary in English and American kitchens well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks of this era routinely list it among the stewed and buttered vegetables rather than the salads. The method here is the old "brown stew" pattern applied to a vegetable: fry in butter for colour, lift out, make a roux from the fat left behind, let down with stock. The practice of paring and seeding is often said to reflect the varieties then grown, which were tougher-skinned than the ones sold now. Cucumber survives today mostly as a raw vegetable in the English-speaking kitchen, so recipes like this one read as unfamiliar, though stewed and braised cucumber remains common in Chinese and Eastern European cooking.