Cucumbers, Stewed
rather more than 1/2 pint of good brown gravy. INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons. -3 large cucumbers, flour, butter, rather more than 1/2 pint CURRANT AND RASPBERRY. of good brown gravy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Cut the cucumbers lengthwise the size of the dish they are intended to be served in; empty them of the seeds, and put them into boiling water with a little salt, and let them simmer for 5 minutes; then take them out, place them in another stewpan, with the gravy, and let them boil over a brisk fire until the cucumbers are tender. Should these be bitter, add a lump of sugar; care fully dish them, skim the sauce, pour over the cucumbers, and serve.
TIME. Altogether, 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE in June, July and August; but may be had, forced, from the beginning of March.
A straightforward braise of cucumber in brown gravy, of a kind that has largely fallen out of English cooking. The method is sound; the ingredient list and the instructions do not quite agree.
- The flour and butter never appearBoth are listed but no step uses them. They are almost certainly meant for a roux to thicken the gravy, or for dredging the cucumber halves before they go into the pan. Either reading works; a tablespoon of each, cooked together and whisked into the gravy, gives the coating consistency the dish expects.
- Quantities"Rather more than half a pint" of gravy is a little over 280 ml, say 300 ml, or a little over a US cup and a quarter.
- Choose the cucumberVarieties available in 1861 were seedier, thicker-skinned and more prone to bitterness than today's. Peel a modern cucumber, halve lengthways and scrape out the seed core with a teaspoon; the flesh that remains is what stews.
- The timing is the hingeThe timing -- Twenty minutes altogether, five of them in salted boiling water, leaves around a quarter of an hour of stewing. Cucumber collapses into water once overcooked. Stop while the pieces still hold their shape under a spoon.
- BitternessThe lump of sugar is a corrective for the cucurbitacins that made old varieties bitter at the stem end. Commercial cucumbers are bred against this, so taste first rather than sweetening as a matter of course.
- Gravy"Good brown gravy" here means a proper meat-based sauce, not thin pan juices. A reduced beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, is the intent; a well-made beef stock reduced by half will do.
- Yield and servingStated as a dish for eight, which by Victorian standards means one dish among several. As a vegetable side today it will serve four generously. It suits roast or braised lamb and mutton.
Stewed cucumber belongs to a long English tradition of treating the cucumber as a hot vegetable rather than a salad item, a practice common from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth and now almost entirely lost. Serving it in a brown meat gravy places it alongside mutton and lamb. The note that cucumbers could be "had, forced, from the beginning of March" points to the hotbeds and heated glasshouses of large English gardens, which pushed the season months ahead of the June-to-August outdoor crop and made early cucumbers a mark of a well-run establishment. The average cost of one shilling and threepence, given for eight people, was a real sum in 1861.