Home › Meat Substitutes › Stuffed Cucumbers
Stuffed Cucumbers
4 rather large cucumbers 1 tomato 1 tablespoon chopped onion 2 tablespoons melted butter 2 cups boiled or steamed rice 1 teaspoon salt Peel the cucumbers, and cut into halves, removing the seeds and some of the pulp. Peel the tomato, and cut into small pieces. Mix with the chopped onion, add the cooked rice, salt and butter. Fill the half cucumbers with the mixture, and bake covered until the latter are tender, or about forty-five minutes in a hot oven. Remove the cover for the last part of the baking.
A simple stuffed vegetable that depends entirely on managing the cucumber's water. Two hundred words of instruction, but the hinge is salting and draining the shells first.
- "A hot oven"In period terms roughly 400-450F. At that heat the forty-five minutes given is plausible for halved cucumber shells; much lower and they will steam rather than roast, and will not colour.
- Drain the shellsCucumbers are roughly 95 percent water and the original says nothing about it. Salt the hollowed halves, leave them cut side down on a rack for 20-30 minutes, then blot dry. Otherwise the rice filling ends up sitting in a puddle.
- Choosing cucumbers"rather large" probably points to a thick-skinned field cucumber with a developed seed cavity, which is consistent with being told to peel and seed them. A large English or slicing cucumber works; skip small pickling types, which have no cavity worth filling.
- CoveringCover means a lid or foil over the baking dish, not over each cucumber. It traps steam so the shells soften. Take it off for the last 10-15 minutes so the rice surface dries and takes some colour.
- The riceTwo cups cooked rice for eight halves is generous; the filling should be loose, not packed. Day-old rice holds its texture better than freshly boiled, which turns pasty against the wet vegetable.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt, one tomato and a tablespoon of onion is a deliberately bland period profile. Black pepper, a little garlic, parsley or dill, and grated cheese or breadcrumbs on top for the uncovered stretch all belong here without changing the dish.
- YieldEight filled halves — four servings as a main course, eight as a side.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the small shelf of American cookbooks of the First World War era, a period when meat was conserved by persuasion rather than by law and, from August 1917, Herbert Hoover's Food Administration promoted "meatless days" as a patriotic act. Books like this one reframed vegetables and grains as "meat substitutes," a category that made sense to readers who understood a meal as a piece of meat with things around it: hollow out a vegetable, fill it with a starch, and the plate has a centre again. Stuffed cucumber is a long-established idea in Turkish, Persian and Central European cooking, where cucumbers and their relatives are filled with rice and often minced lamb; the American version is meatless. Cooked cucumber, common enough in nineteenth-century kitchens as a stewed or fried vegetable, has largely fallen out of the English-speaking repertoire, which is why the dish reads as odder now than it once did.