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Scalloped Cucumbers
Wash, pare, and cut into cubes three large cucumbers. Arrange a layer in the bottom of a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and with one teaspoon finely chopped onion, and continue thus until dish is filled, then add one cup milk or chicken stock, cover with buttered and seasoned crumbs, and bake in hot oven until brown.
Béchamel Cucumbers Pare four cucumbers, parboil four minutes, drain and let them stand in ice water one half hour. Cut in thin slices, cover with Béchamel Sauce, cook until tender, and serve on buttered triangles of toasted bread. Garnish with olive in center of each triangle and toast points. Banana fried in Crumbs Remove skin from six bananas, cut in halves lengthwise and crosswise. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and lemon juice, dip in flour, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper, serve on folded napkin.
Garnish with lemon and parsley. Serve with or without Lemon or Sherry Sauce.
Farina Balls or Hominy Crescents 1/2 cup farina or hominy ½ cup milk 1½ cups chicken stock 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon paprika few drops onion juice one egg Mix milk and chicken stock, add farina or hominy, and cook in double boiler forty minutes. Add remaining ingredients, cool, shape in balls or crescents, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs. Fry in deep fat.
Serve as an entrée with a sweet sauce or as a garnish with game.
Four short entrée recipes share this page. The scalloped cucumbers are the simplest and the most likely to disappoint if the water is not dealt with first.
- Drain the cucumbersCucumbers are roughly 95 percent water, and the original relies on a hot oven to drive it off. Salt the cubes, let them sit 20-30 minutes, and press dry before layering, or the dish will be a soup under a crust.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period that is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F; the recipe itself gives no number and no time, so bake until the crumbs are well browned and the cubes are tender.
- YieldThree large cucumbers, cubed, will roughly fill a 1½-quart dish; enough for about four as a side or light course.
- Buttered crumbsDry white breadcrumbs tossed with about 2 tablespoons melted butter per cup, seasoned with salt and pepper. Panko works but browns faster; check at 20 minutes.
- Farina and hominyFarina is fine-milled wheat semolina, sold today as Cream of Wheat or similar. "Hominy" here is most likely the dry ground kind, i.e. hominy grits, rather than whole hulled kernels -- the double-boiler cook and the shaping both point that way.
- A missing quantityThe farina recipe opens with "cup farina or hominy" -- the fraction has dropped out of the original text. Judging by the 2 cups of liquid, ½ cup is the plausible reading, but it is a guess; go by texture and cook until the mush is stiff enough to hold a shape when cooled.
- Double boiler timingForty minutes over water suits the coarse cereals of the period. Modern quick-cooking farina thickens in three to five minutes; use old-fashioned grits or regular semolina if you want the long, stiff cook the shaping depends on.
- Deep frying375F for the banana pieces and the farina croquettes. "Drain on brown paper" means paper towels or a rack; the folded napkin and toast points are plating conventions of the era and optional.
- Béchamel cucumbersThe parboil-then-ice-water step firms the flesh before slicing; the recipe has you slice only after chilling, and it is worth following that order or the pieces break down in the sauce.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored books of the early 1900s it surrounds its chocolate chapters with a full general cookbook. These four dishes show what "entrée" meant then: not the main course in the American sense, but a made dish served between the heavier courses, often meatless and often built from a vegetable or a cereal dressed up with sauce, crumbs and a garnish. Cooked cucumber appeared on such menus more often than it does now, scalloped, stewed or stuffed. "Scalloped" itself is generally traced to the old sense of cooking in a scallop shell, and by this period simply meant layered in a dish with liquid and a crumb top. Bananas had become an ordinary grocery item in northern cities in the decades before the book appeared, as steamship transport improved, and cookbooks of the period still found uses for them as a cooked, battered dish served with a sweet sauce.