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Cucumber Fritters
Pare, discard seeds and grate rather old cucumbers. Press and discard the juice. To 1 pint of pulp add 3 well-beaten eggs, ½ teaspoonful each of salt and black pepper and enough flour to make a drop batter. Fry by spoonfuls dropped in deep fat or sauté in a little fat in a spider. Squash or tomato fritters may be made in the same way.
A frugal way to use up cucumbers that have gone past salad condition. The whole recipe hinges on getting the water out, so treat the pressing step as the real work.
- Draining is the whole recipeGrated cucumber is mostly water, and any juice left behind will loosen the batter and make the fritters steam rather than brown. Salt the grated pulp lightly, let it stand 20-30 minutes, then squeeze it hard in a towel before measuring.
- "Rather old cucumbers"This means fruit that has grown large, gone pale or yellow and developed tough seeds and skin — the kind a modern shopper never sees but a gardener has by the bushel in August. Ordinary supermarket cucumbers work; English or Persian types need less peeling.
- A pint of pulpTwo cups, measured after pressing; depending on size, that may take three or four large field cucumbers. Measure loosely packed rather than tamped down.
- "Enough flour"Expect about ½ to ¾ cup for a pint of drained pulp with three eggs. A drop batter should fall thickly from a spoon and hold its shape briefly on the surface of the fat, not run.
- A spiderA cast-iron frying pan, originally with legs to stand over coals. Any heavy skillet does the same job for the shallow-fry version.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature. For deep fat, the usual modern range is 365-375F: below that the batter absorbs grease, above it the outside colours before the egg sets. Two to three minutes a side is a reasonable guide; drain on paper.
- The squash and tomato variationsSummer squash behaves like cucumber and wants the same pressing. Tomatoes carry far more juice and acid — drain the pulp well and expect to add more flour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint of pulp will make roughly a dozen and a half small fritters, enough for about four as a vegetable side. They are best straight from the pan; reheating turns them soft.
Fritters of this kind were a common American answer to a garden surplus: bind any drained vegetable pulp with egg and flour and fry it, and corn, squash, parsnip, tomato and cucumber all pass through the same batter in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks. The instruction to use "rather old cucumbers" suggests a household that grew its own — an overgrown cucumber is often too bitter and seedy to slice but usable grated. The "spider," a long-handled iron pan that once stood on legs above the hearth coals, kept its name in print for decades after stoves made the legs pointless.