Cucumber Sauce
INGREDIENTS. -3 cucumbers, 2 oz. of butter, 6 tablespoonfuls of brown gravy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. Peel the cucumbers, quarter them, and take out the seeds; cut them into small CUCUMBER. pieces, put them in a cloth, and rub them well to take out the water that hangs about them. Put the butter in a saucepan, add the cucumbers, and shake them over a sharp fire until they are of a good colour; then pour over them the gravy, mixed with the cucumbers, and simmer gently for 10 minutes, when it will be ready to serve.
TIME. Altogether, hour.
CUCUMBER VINEGAR.
A brief cooked cucumber sauce — really a garnish of buttered cucumber pieces bound with meat gravy — meant to go beside lamb, mutton or a roast bird. The whole thing hinges on getting the water out of the cucumber before it meets the pan.
- Telegraph cucumbersA long, thin-skinned frame variety grown under glass, of the type that lies behind the modern English or hothouse cucumber. Three of them is a large quantity for a sauce; two will serve most tables.
- Wringing out the waterRubbing the diced cucumber in a cloth is the step that decides the dish. Salting the pieces for 20-30 minutes first draws out considerably more liquid, and without that the butter will never brown them — they simply stew in their own juice.
- "Brown gravy"In Beeton this generally means a well-coloured meat stock, usually thickened with browned flour and butter, rather than pan drippings. A good reduced beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, gives the right body.
- A sharp fireHigh heat, and a wide pan so the pieces sit in a single layer. Crowding them will undo the work of drying.
- TimingTen minutes' gentle simmering after the gravy goes in is right for pieces that still have some bite; longer and they collapse to a purée.
- CostOne shilling was a real outlay in the 1860s, reflecting that cucumbers were a forced, glasshouse crop for much of the year.
- YieldSix tablespoons of gravy to three cucumbers makes a scant, thick sauce rather than a pourable one. The recipe states no number of servings.
Cooked cucumber is one of the quiet casualties of twentieth-century cooking: to Victorian and Georgian kitchens the cucumber was as much a vegetable to be stewed, fried or stuffed as a salad ingredient, and Beeton gives several treatments of it in this vein. The "telegraph" is a named variety of long frame cucumber popular in English glasshouses from the mid-nineteenth century. Served alongside lamb or mutton, this sauce fills the same role that mint or a sharp jelly does now — a fresh counterweight to fatty roast meat.