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Stuffed Cucumbers
1 cup pecans or Brazil nuts 6 tablespoons mashed potatoes 1 well-beaten egg 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons chopped parsley 1 saltspoon white pepper Dash of grated nutmeg 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 cup white sauce 1 teaspoon capers Dash of powdered cloves 1 well-beaten egg Salt and pepper Cut the cucumbers in half lengthwise; remove the seeds with a spoon; lay the cucumbers in vinegar over night; then wipe dry and fill with a mixture made from the chopped nuts, potatoes, egg, salt, parsley, pepper, nutmeg and butter. Bake in a buttered baking tin until tender. Serve hot with white sauce, to which has been added the capers, cloves, egg and seasoning.
For additional recipes for vegetables see chapter on "Meat Substitutes."
A meatless main from the era when nuts stood in for meat, with a curious overnight vinegar soak that does most of the seasoning work. The ingredient list omits the cucumbers themselves and the oven is never described, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- How many cucumbersThe list never says. The filling would stretch to roughly two or three medium cucumbers halved lengthwise; judge by eye and by how thickly you heap the boats.
- The vinegar soak is the pointAn overnight bath in plain cider or white vinegar firms the flesh and cuts the flatness of baked cucumber. Wipe the halves genuinely dry before filling or the stuffing turns to paste. Cover and refrigerate rather than leaving them on the counter.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The teaspoon of salt in the filling is generous given the vinegar soak; start with three-quarters.
- Oven heatUnspecified. A moderate oven, 350F, for 30 to 40 minutes, until a knife slips through the cucumber wall without resistance. Cucumber goes watery and collapses if pushed much hotter.
- The nutsBrazil nuts were a good deal more familiar in early twentieth-century American kitchens than they are now. Pecans work as well and toast better; chop them fine, roughly the texture of coarse breadcrumbs, so the filling holds together.
- Egg in the sauceThe second beaten egg goes into the finished white sauce off the heat, or the sauce will curdle. Temper it with a few spoonfuls of hot sauce first, then return the pan to low heat only long enough to thicken.
- White sauceA cup of the usual thin white sauce of the period: one tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk, the roux cooked out for a minute or two before the milk goes in. The cloves and capers are best added at the end, since acid held in a milk sauce over long heat can break it.
- Baking tinA shallow buttered dish just large enough to hold the halves upright and touching. A splash of water in the bottom keeps the undersides from scorching before the tops brown.
The cross-reference to the chapter on "Meat Substitutes" places this squarely in the vegetarian current running through American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s, when nut loaves, nut roasts and nut-stuffed vegetables were promoted both by health reformers and, during the First World War, by meatless-day campaigns. Nuts of various kinds served as the bulk ingredient for such dishes, cheap, fatty and mealy enough to read as meat when bound with potato and egg. The overnight vinegar soak reflects an older suspicion of the cucumber, long regarded as cold, watery and hard to digest; salting or pickling it before cooking is often said to have been recommended in nineteenth-century household manuals. The finishing touch, capers and a dash of cloves in a white sauce, is a survival of the older English style of piquant sauces for boiled and baked dishes.