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Stuffed Cucumbers (Pan mix until smooth add)
in the pan, mix until smooth; add the stock, stir continually until it boils, then add salt and pepper to taste. Return the cucumbers, cover and stew gently twenty minutes; serve on squares of buttered toast. These may be served with roasted chicken or baked fish.
This page picks up mid-recipe: the opening lines, with the stuffing and the quantities, belong to the previous page. What survives is the finishing of the dish — a roux-thickened stock, the cucumbers returned to stew, and the service on toast — and it can be read as a method rather than a formula.
- What is missingThe instruction "in the pan, mix until smooth" follows flour being stirred into butter or the fat left from browning the stuffed cucumbers. Without the earlier page you have no weights for cucumbers, stuffing or stock; work from about 1 tbsp each butter and flour per cup of stock.
- The cucumbers themselvesPeriod recipes of this type generally use large, thick, seedy field cucumbers, peeled, halved or cut into lengths and hollowed out to hold forcemeat. Modern slicing cucumbers are thinner-walled and waterier; English or Persian types have thinner walls still and hold a stuffing less well.
- Stock"The stock" here would have been homemade meat or poultry broth, likely lightly seasoned or unseasoned. Commercial broth is already salted, so taste before adding any.
- Twenty minutes is longCucumber flesh softens quickly. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer gives tender walls that still hold their shape; the full twenty is likely to leave them very soft unless the cucumbers are unusually thick.
- If the stuffing is raw meatA gentle stew is a low-temperature cooking method. Bring the centre of a meat forcemeat to 165F before serving, which may mean the cucumbers are done before the filling is.
- Toast squaresThe buttered toast is there to absorb the sauce, so cut it thick and toast it dry and firm. Soft sandwich bread turns to paste under a stewed vegetable.
- YieldReckon one large stuffed cucumber half per person as a side dish with chicken or fish, two if it is the main course of a light supper.
Stuffed and stewed cucumbers belonged to a long European tradition of treating the cucumber as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad ingredient — hollowed, filled with forcemeat, braised in broth and sauced, much as marrows and small squashes were. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks are full of such dishes, partly because raw cucumbers were widely distrusted as indigestible, a suspicion repeated in household manuals well into the 1900s. The reflex here of setting the vegetable on buttered toast is characteristic of the period: toast soaked up the sauce, and it appears under creamed spinach, stewed mushrooms and poached eggs alike throughout books of this kind.