Home › Recipes › Cucumber Salad. No. 1
Cucumber Salad. No. 1
Two cucumbers, French dressing.
Pare and slice the cucumbers very thin, throw them into cold water for one hour, drain and dry. When ready to serve put them into a salad bowl and pour over them a French dressing.
A three-line recipe whose whole character depends on two things: the thinness of the slices and how thoroughly they are dried. Neither is optional.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing of later American supermarkets. It means a simple vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, whisked at the moment of serving.
- Which cucumbersCucumbers of the period were generally thicker-skinned and seedier than modern varieties, which is likely why the recipe says to pare. A modern English or Persian cucumber needs no peeling; two of them will make roughly four servings as a side.
- Slice thinner than seems sensibleThe dish works only when the slices are near-translucent. A mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater does in a minute what a knife struggles at.
- The cold-water hourSoaking crisps the slices by letting them take up water; it is not a soaking-out of bitterness. Ice water will do the same job faster, and in practice half an hour often suffices, though the recipe asks for a full hour.
- Drying is the hingeWet cucumber will not hold dressing, and the water pools into a thin sour puddle within minutes. Drain, then press between clean towels until the slices no longer feel slick.
- Dress at the tableSalt and vinegar draw water immediately. Pour the dressing over as the bowl goes out, not before, or the hour in cold water is wasted.
- YieldTwo cucumbers make about four servings as a side salad.
Cucumber salad appears in a great many English and American cookery collections of the nineteenth century, usually in this bare form, and its frequency says something about how the vegetable was regarded: cool, watery, faintly suspect, and in need of correction by acid and salt. Older writers repeated the folk belief that cucumbers were indigestible unless well seasoned; Samuel Johnson is traditionally quoted as saying that a cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing. Small single-subject salad collections proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century. The numbering here (No. 1) suggests the book carried more than one version of the salad.