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Cucumber Cups
This makes a dainty dish for luncheon. Cut the unpeeled vegetables into sections two inches long and cook until tender in water salted just before cooking is completed. Scoop out the center of each section, leaving one-half-inch thickness all around the sides, as well as on the bottom, thus making pretty green cups of the vegetable. These cups may be filled with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms or any other filling, held together with white sauce.
A 1920s luncheon presentation piece: cucumber boiled as a hot vegetable, hollowed into cups and filled. The technique holds up, but cucumber collapses fast, so the cooking window is the whole game.
- The hinge: undercook themSimmer the sections only until a knife tip meets slight resistance, roughly 4 to 6 minutes depending on thickness. Cucumber goes watery and structurally useless within a minute or two past that, and the cups will slump under a filling.
- Choose the right cucumberUse a straight, thick field cucumber rather than a thin-skinned English one; the skin is what holds the cup together, and a 2-inch section needs enough diameter to leave half-inch walls with a usable cavity. Scrub well since the peel stays on.
- Salting at the endThe instruction to salt only as cooking finishes reflects a belief that early salt toughens or draws water from vegetables. In practice salting the water from the start seasons more evenly and does no harm here.
- HollowingA melon baller or a narrow teaspoon works better than a knife. Do it after cooking, as directed, and let the cups drain cut-side down on a towel for a few minutes or the filling will thin.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce is presumably what is intended: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Keep it on the thick side, since the cucumber will release liquid into it.
- SweetbreadsNot a supermarket item now, and they require ordering from a butcher plus soaking, blanching and peeling. Creamed chicken, mushrooms, or crab are direct substitutes that need no such preparation.
- Yield and servingA large cucumber gives three or four cups; count two or three per person as a first course or light lunch. Serve immediately while hot, as they weep on standing.
Hot cooked cucumber, which reads oddly to modern cooks who know the vegetable only raw, was routine in Anglo-American kitchens through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, stewed in butter or dressed with white sauce like marrow or summer squash. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick magazine The Delineator, aimed at homemakers running a household on a budget but still expected to produce a company luncheon, and "dainty" edible containers were exactly the currency of that occasion: hollowed tomatoes, bread croustades, pastry timbales and green pepper cases all appear in the same period. Filling them with creamed chicken or sweetbreads stretched a small amount of expensive protein across a plate while making it look deliberate, which is the quiet economics behind much luncheon cookery of the 1920s and early 1930s.