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Stuffed Cucumbers (Cut each cucumber in halves)
Cut each cucumber in halves and scrape out the seeds. To each six allow a half cup of bread crumbs, two tablespoonfuls of chopped ham, one tablespoonful of parsley, one tablespoonful of chopped onion, salt and pepper to taste. Mix the ingredients together, fill the cucumbers, tie the two halves together, place them in a baking pan. Add one cup of water to the pan, cover with another pan and bake in a moderate oven three-quarters of an hour. Serve with drawn butter in a boat. The cucumbers may also be served in halves and the sauce poured over them.
A straightforward stuffed vegetable in the late-Victorian style, where cucumber is treated as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad item. The method is a covered braise-bake, so most of the work is in the stuffing and the tying.
- Choose the right cucumberUse firm, thick field cucumbers rather than thin-skinned English or Persian types, which are more likely to collapse over a long bake. The recipe says nothing about peeling, so it is left to preference.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F. The cup of water plus a second pan covering the top creates a steam chamber, so the cucumbers braise rather than roast.
- Tying the halvesKitchen twine, two or three loops per cucumber, tied snugly but not so tight that the halves crush. Cut the twine off before serving, or serve the halves open as the recipe's alternative suggests.
- "Chopped ham"This means cooked ham, and in this period it may well have been salty dry-cured ham scraps. Modern deli ham is much milder and wetter; taste before adding salt, and consider prosciutto ends or country ham for the intended savor.
- Drawn butterNot clarified butter, despite the modern usage. Period drawn butter is a light flour-thickened butter sauce: roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, thinned with a cup of hot water or light stock, then finished with more butter off the heat. "In a boat" means a sauceboat at table.
- TimingThree-quarters of an hour gives fully soft, almost melting cucumber, which is the period expectation. If you want the halves to hold together for plating, check at 30 minutes; a knife should meet no resistance but the shell should not slump.
- Seasoning the crumbsHalf a cup of dry crumbs for six cucumbers is a lean, loose stuffing. Moisten it with a spoonful or two of stock, cream, or melted butter so it does not bake to sawdust inside the shell.
- YieldSix cucumbers, twelve halves, serves six as a side dish.
Cucumbers were eaten hot far more often in nineteenth-century cookery than they are now: stewed, fried in batter, or stuffed and baked in the manner of the marrows and squashes they were grouped with. Part of the reason was medical folklore, which long held raw cucumber to be indigestible and dangerous to the stomach, a suspicion repeated in household manuals well into the 1800s; cooking was the respectable remedy. The stuffing here, breadcrumbs stretched with a little chopped ham, onion and parsley, is a common economical forcemeat of the period, a mixture also used for tomatoes, peppers, onions and eggplant, and it shows how a small quantity of cured meat was made to flavor a whole dish. The finishing sauce, drawn butter, was widely used in American vegetable cookery before French-derived sauces became common in home kitchens.