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Cucumbers Stewed with Onions
INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons.-4 cucumbers, 3 moderate-sized onions, not quite 1 pint of white stock, cayenne and salt to taste, the yolks of 2 eggs, a very little grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Pare and slice the cucumbers, take out the seeds, and cut the onions into thin slices; put these both into a stewpan, with the stock, and let them boil for 1/4 hour, or longer, should the cucumbers be very largち.
Beat up the yolks of 2 eggs; stir these into the sauce; add the cayenne, salt, and grated nutmeg; bring it to the point of boiling, and serve. Do not allow the sauce to boil, or it will curdle. This is a favourite dish with lamb or mutton chops, rumpsteaks, &c. TIME.-Altogether, 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE in July, August and September; but may be had, forced, from the beginning of March.
A Victorian vegetable side that treats the cucumber as something to be stewed rather than sliced raw. It is simple, but the egg liaison at the end is unforgiving.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must come only to the point of steaming — around 170-175F. Beat a ladle of the hot stock into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat, stirring. A single boil and you have sweet cucumber soup with scrambled egg in it.
- White stockA pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock, unsalted and unreduced. A light chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; avoid anything dark, heavily herbed or salty, since the dish depends on the cucumber and onion flavour coming through.
- "Not quite 1 pint"An imperial pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so this is a little under that, roughly 500-550 ml. The vegetables give up a good deal of water as they cook, so err on the low side.
- Cucumbers then and nowFrame-grown cucumbers of the period tended to be long and coarsely seeded, which may be why Mrs Beeton says to pare them and take out the seeds. Four of them is a great deal of cucumber; two large English cucumbers, or three or four small ones, will serve eight. Halve lengthwise, scoop the seeds with a teaspoon, and slice about a quarter inch thick.
- Managing the waterCucumber is over 95 per cent water. Salting the slices for 20 minutes and patting them dry before they go in the pan keeps the sauce from thinning out, and gives you a firmer texture at the end.
- The 15 minutes is deliberateThis is not a crisp preparation. A quarter hour leaves the slices soft and translucent, closer to stewed marrow than salad. If you want them to hold their shape, 8-10 minutes is enough, but the dish then wants a little cornflour slaked in cold stock to help the sauce along.
- StewpanA broad, lidded pan. Width matters here: the vegetables should sit in more or less one layer so they cook evenly rather than steaming into pulp at the bottom.
- Yield and servingAs written, eight as a side. It was meant to go alongside lamb or mutton chops or rump steak, and it still does — the nutmeg and cayenne are there to keep it from tasting merely watery, so be less timid with both than the phrase "a very little" suggests.
Cooked cucumber is one of the things Victorian cookery did routinely and we have almost entirely abandoned. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the raw cucumber carried a mild reputation for indigestibility — the quip attributed to Dr Johnson about dressing a cucumber and then throwing it out was widely repeated — and stewing, frying or stuffing them was a familiar English treatment. The note that they may be had "forced, from the beginning of March" points at the hot-house and frame gardening that supplied large households out of season. The egg-yolk liaison is standard nineteenth-century sauce technique of French derivation, and the warning against boiling appears wherever Mrs Beeton uses it.