Home › C › Cucumbers, Excellent Way of Preserving
Cucumbers, Excellent Way of Preserving
INGREDIENTS. Salt and water, 1 lb. of lump sugar, the rind of 1 lemon, 1 oz. of ginger, cucumbers.
Choose the greenest cucumbers, and those that are most free from seeds; put them in strong salt and water, with a cabbage-leaf to keep them down; tie a paper over them, and put them in a warm place till they are yellow, then wash them and set them over the fire in fresh water with a very little salt, and another cabbage-leaf over them; cover very closely, but take care they do not boil. If they are not a fine green, change the water again, cover them as before, and make them hot. When they are a good colour take them off the fire and let them cool; cut them in quarters, take out the seeds and pulp, and put them into cold water; let them remain for 2 days, changing the water twice each day, to draw out the salt. Put the sugar, with 1/24 pint of water, in a saucepan over the fire; remove the scum as it rises, and add the lemon-peel and ginger with the outside scraped off; when the syrup is tolerably thick, take it off the fire, and when cold, wipe the cucumbers dry and put them in.
Boil the syrup once in 2 or 3 days for 3 weeks; strengthen it if required, and let it be quite cold before the cucumbers are put in. Great attention must be paid to the CUCUMBERS, FRIED. directions in the commencement of this recipe, as, if these are not properly carried out, the result will be far from satisfactory.
SEASONABLE. This recipe should be used in June, July or August.
Cucumbers, Fried. INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. -2 cucumbers, pepper and salt to taste, flour, oil or butter. AVERAGE COST, 4d. each.
Pare the cucumbers, and cut them into slices of an equal thickness, commencing to slice from the thick and not the stalk end of the cucumber. Wipe the slices dry with a cloth, dredge them with flour, and put them into a pan of boiling oil or butter; keep turning them about until brown; lift them out of the pan, let them drain, and serve, piled lightly in a dish. These will be found a great improvement to rump-steak: they should be placed on a dish with the steak on the top.
TIME.-5 minutes.
SEASONABLE.- Forced from the beginning of March to the end of June; in full season in July and August.
Cucumbers, German Method of Keeping for Winter use. - INGREDIENTS.-Cucumbers, salt.
Pare and slice the cucumbers (as for the table), sprinkle well with salt, and let them remain for 24 hours; strain off the liquor, pack in jars, a thick layer of cucumbers and salt alternately; tie down closely, and, when wanted for use, take out the quantity required. Now wash them well in fresh water, and dress as usual with pepper, vinegar and oil.
Three separate cucumber entries run together here: a sugar preserve, a fried side dish, and a dry-salt keeping method. Only the fried cucumbers translate directly to a modern kitchen.
- Why the salt-packing method failsThe winter-keeping method gives no weight of salt, no brine strength and no storage temperature, and the jars are only "tied down" rather than sealed. With the salt unmeasured there is no way to know whether the pack is strong enough to keep the cucumbers safe, and rinsing before serving does nothing to a toxin already formed. Use a current tested recipe for salted or fermented cucumbers instead.
- The yellowing stepStanding cucumbers in strong salt and water in a warm place until they turn yellow is a deliberate soften-and-slacken stage, not spoilage in the period's terms, but it is an uncontrolled steep at ambient warmth with no acidity target. It is the weak point of the preserve, and the recipe's own insistence that the opening directions be followed exactly covers this stage and the greening that follows it.
- How the "fine green" was really gotRepeated heating in fresh water will not turn a yellowed cucumber bright green. Preservers of the period got that colour from copper or brass pans, sometimes with verdigris added outright, and Victorian food chemists were already condemning the practice. Nothing in a modern kitchen reproduces it, and nothing should.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone; 1 lb of ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. It was specified because it was cleaner than moist sugars and threw less scum.
- The syrup waterThe quantity of water for the syrup is unreadable as printed and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Comparable preserves of the period use roughly a quarter of a pint (about 5 fl oz) to a pound of sugar.
- The gingerOne ounce of whole ginger root, scraped as the recipe directs, rather than ground ginger. The recipe does not say to remove it or the lemon peel; if you would rather not fish them out of the syrup at each boiling, tie them together in muslin.
- Fried cucumbers: fat and heat"Boiling oil or butter" means fat hot enough to fry hard; a modern equivalent would be roughly 350-375F, though the recipe gives no temperature and does not say how deep the fat should be. Butter alone will brown before the slices do; clarified butter or a neutral oil holds up better. Five minutes matches the time given.
- Drying the slicesCucumber is mostly water, and wet slices will steam rather than crisp and will spit in the fat. Salting the slices briefly, then wiping them thoroughly dry before flouring, is the single step that decides the result.
- YieldTwo cucumbers fried will garnish steak for six as the original intends, but as a vegetable in their own right they serve two or three.
Preserved cucumber belongs to the long English tradition of turning firm, unripe garden produce into sweetmeats: green walnuts, unripe apricots, angelica stems and cucumbers were all candied in heavy syrup and served at dessert or used as decoration. The method here, with its cabbage-leaf weight, its salt steep and its syrup boiled up every few days for three weeks, is essentially eighteenth-century confectionery practice, and Beeton's compilers took it over from earlier household manuals with little change. The bright green that the recipe presses for is the tell: colour was the mark of a well-made preserve, and the trade's habit of getting it from copper vessels was one of the adulteration scandals of the mid-nineteenth century, pressed by adulteration writers such as Accum and Hassall. The fried cucumbers, offered as a bed for rump steak, are a reminder that the Victorian table treated cucumber as a cooked vegetable at least as often as a salad, and the "forced from the beginning of March" note points to the heated glasshouses that supplied wealthy households out of season.