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Cucumbers
Generally served sliced thinly and eaten raw. But if too old to serve in this way, they may be pared, cut in quarters, boiled, drained, mashed, and seasoned with salt and pepper.
Or they may be cut in quarters, dipped in batter, and fried in deep fat.
A three-line entry that assumes the cook already knows what a batter and a kettle of deep fat are. It gives no quantities, times or temperatures, so the useful work is filling those in.
- The point of the recipeThese are salvage methods for cucumbers that have gone large, seedy and bitter on the vine. A modern supermarket cucumber does not need them; a forgotten one from the garden, yellowing and thick-skinned, does.
- Seed the old onesOnce a cucumber is past slicing size the seed core is soft and bitter. After paring and quartering, scrape the seeds out with a spoon before boiling or battering. The book does not say to.
- Boiling and the water problemQuartered cucumber is tender in 8 to 10 minutes in salted water. It holds enormous quantities of water, so drain it thoroughly and let it steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing, or the result is soup. Salting the cut pieces for 20 minutes and pressing them dry beforehand helps more than anything else.
- Seasoning the mashSalt and pepper alone leaves a very plain dish. Butter, or a spoonful of cream stirred into the drained pulp, is in keeping with the period and makes it worth eating.
- Deep fat"Deep fat" here means a kettle of lard or other cooking fat, with no temperature given; the period test was browning a cube of bread in about a minute, which corresponds to roughly 375F. Quarters are thick for frying; batons or half-inch slices cook through before the batter darkens.
- BatterNo batter is specified. A plain one of 1 cup flour, 1 egg and about 3/4 cup milk, seasoned with salt, is the sort the book means. Pat the cucumber dry first or the batter slides off.
- Raw and slicedFor the raw treatment, period books commonly direct slicing paper-thin, salting, letting stand about 30 minutes, draining and dressing with vinegar and pepper. The salting draws out the watery juice.
- YieldTwo medium cucumbers, mashed, serve two to three as a side. Fried, allow one cucumber per person, since the pieces shrink.
Cucumbers had a mixed reputation in nineteenth-century America. Widely grown and cheap, they were also blamed for indigestion and, in hot weather, associated with cholera morbus, and many household books directed that they be pared, salted and dressed with vinegar before reaching the table. Cooking was one recognised use for fruit grown too far past its prime for slicing, and short lists of this kind -- boil, drain, mash, or batter and fry -- turn up for other bland vegetables as well. Lowney's is a chocolate company's cookbook, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, and its vegetable chapter reads as a compact reference of this kind, giving the minimum a household cook would need for anything not made with chocolate.