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Cream of Cucumber Soup
Grate some ripe cucumbers, make a thin sauce with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 scant teaspoonful of salt, 1/3 of a teaspoonful of white pepper and 1 quart of milk. Press and discard the juice from the cucumber pulp; put 1 pint in a saucepan with 1 tablespoonful of butter, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. Turn this into the white sauce, stir and simmer for ten minutes then press through a sieve. Add seasoning if needed, reheat and serve with fried croutons. 1
A plain milk-and-flour cream soup of the kind that filled the soup chapter of every economy cookbook. Two details decide whether it works: what kind of cucumber you use, and how hard you let the milk cook.
- "Ripe" cucumbersThis most likely means mature, yellowing, seedy cucumbers past salad stage rather than simply fresh ones — the sort that were cheap or plentiful from the garden. Large field cucumbers, peeled and seeded, are the nearest modern equivalent; English or Persian cucumbers will tend to give a milder, thinner result.
- QuantitiesYou need enough grated pulp to yield 1 pint after the juice is pressed out. The recipe gives no cucumber weight at all; expect to need somewhere in the region of 2 to 4 lb of large cucumbers, so buy generously and measure the drained pulp.
- Don't discard the juice on principleThe recipe gives no reason, but the likely one is texture: the juice thins the soup. Save it chilled and use a few spoonfuls at the end to sharpen the finished soup if it tastes flat.
- The sauce is a thin béchamel2 tablespoons butter to 3 tablespoons flour to a quart of milk is deliberately loose. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before adding milk, and add the milk warm and gradually to avoid lumps.
- Keep it below a boilA floury milk soup at a rolling boil will catch on the bottom and can separate. Hold both simmering stages at a bare tremble and stir often.
- SievingPressing through a sieve was the usual method in the period. A blender or immersion blender gives a smoother result in seconds; pass it through a fine sieve afterward if you want the old texture.
- SeasoningWhite pepper was probably specified so no dark flecks show in a pale soup — black pepper works and simply looks different. A grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the table suits it well.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, or six modest first-course servings. The stray "1" at the end of the text is a printing artifact, not an ingredient.
Cream soups built on a flour-thickened milk base were the backbone of household soup chapters from the 1880s through the 1930s, because they turned a small amount of vegetable into a full course without stock, and stock meant meat. Cucumber in particular was a late-summer surplus problem: the plants keep producing past the point where the fruit is pleasant sliced, and the big yellowing ones were cooked, stewed, or pushed into soup rather than wasted. Cooked cucumber is unfamiliar in most English-speaking kitchens now, but it was ordinary in the period and remains common in Chinese cooking, where it is simmered in soups and braises. The direction to press out and discard the juice reflects a practical fact about the vegetable — the fruit is mostly water, and that water is the enemy of a thickened soup.