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Smothered Cucumbers
For this dish use cucumbers which are quite old but not yellow. Pare and cut lengthwise in quarters. Scrape off and discard the seeds. Cut the pulp into half-inch pieces, measure and place in a saucepan. For each pint add a scant ½ teaspoonful of salt, a pinch of sugar, 1/4 of a teaspoonful of paprika (sweet red pepper) and 1 tablespoonful of butter. Cover closely, stand over the front of the fire for five minutes, shaking vigorously, then draw back where the cucumbers will cook slowly for fifteen minutes. No liquid is needed as sufficient will be drawn from the vegetable to form a sauce. Garnish with toast points.
A stovetop braise that relies entirely on the water the cucumbers give up, so the pan and the heat matter more than the ingredient list.
- The hinge: a tight lidThere is no added liquid, so any steam that escapes is sauce lost and the cucumbers will scorch. Use a heavy saucepan with a well-fitting lid and lift it as little as possible.
- "Front of the fire" and "draw back"On a coal range a pan was moved toward or away from the firebox to change the heat, the front of the top generally being hotter and the back cooler. Translate as five minutes over medium heat, shaking the covered pan, then fifteen minutes at the lowest simmer your burner will hold.
- QuantitiesMeasured by volume after cutting: per pint (2 cups) of cucumber pieces, a scant 1/2 teaspoon salt, a pinch of sugar, 1/4 teaspoon paprika, 1 tablespoon butter. A pint is roughly two large cucumbers once pared and seeded.
- "Quite old but not yellow"The book means fully grown cucumbers with tough skin and developed seeds, picked before they turn yellow and overripe. Modern seedless or English cucumbers are milder and softer-fleshed and are likelier to break down; use a firm slicing cucumber and scrape the seed core out as directed.
- PaprikaThe parenthetical "sweet red pepper" tells you this is mild sweet paprika, not the hot or smoked kinds now common. Smoked paprika would dominate the dish.
- Watery resultOlder cucumbers can throw more liquid than you want. If it is thin at the end, uncover and boil hard for a minute or two rather than adding thickener.
- Yield and servingA pint of cut cucumber serves about two as a side. Toast points are triangles of toast set around the edge of the dish, where they soak up the sauce.
Cooked cucumber was ordinary in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British kitchens, where the vegetable was stewed, stuffed or fried as well as sliced raw; the assumption that a cucumber is a salad vegetable only is comparatively recent. "Smothered" is the old kitchen term for cooking something closely covered in its own moisture with a little fat, the same usage that survives in smothered chicken and smothered onions, and it calls for no stock, no cream and no oven. The instruction to use cucumbers that are old but not yellow may well be thrift: overgrown fruit was poor salad stock, and this treatment turns its coarse flesh and heavy water content into an advantage.