Home › Salad Dressings › Cucumber Salad
Cucumber Salad
(German style.) Pare large cucumbers and cut them into thin slices; cut each slice round and round so as to form a long, narrow curling strip. Let these strips stand two hours in salted ice water, drain, and dry in a soft cloth. Serve with French dressing. Toss first in the oil, then add the condiments, and lastly the vinegar. Americans would prefer to omit the salt from the ice water, as it softens the cucumber.
A cutting exercise more than a recipe, and the dressing method is the part worth copying.
- The curling stripCutting each round "round and round" means paring the slice in a spiral, the way you peel an apple, to make one long ribbon. A vegetable peeler drawn lengthwise down the whole cucumber gives the same effect with far less trouble.
- Salt water versus plainThe recipe says plainly that the salt softens the cucumber, and notes that Americans would leave it out for that reason. The curl comes from the cutting, not the soak. Decide which texture you want before you soak.
- Two hours is longHalf an hour to an hour in ice water is enough for modern cucumbers; two hours is a long soak by present standards.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Oil will not cling to wet cucumber, and residual water thins the dressing into a puddle. Blot in a towel until the strips feel dry to the touch.
- Order of dressingOil first coats the surfaces, so the vinegar cannot draw more liquid out; the recipe puts the condiments next and the vinegar last. If you dress ahead, the salad will weep.
- French dressing, 1900In period usage this generally meant oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing of later decades; something near three parts oil to one of vinegar was the common proportion.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities or yield; it simply says 'large cucumbers'.
Cucumbers in salted or iced water are a fixture of nineteenth-century American cookery, where the vegetable was widely suspected of being indigestible and long soaking was thought to correct it. The "German style" label points to the *Gurkensalat* of German-speaking Europe, where cucumbers are sliced paper-thin, salted to draw off water, and dressed with vinegar and oil or sour cream — a dish that became familiar in American kitchens with German immigration. The closing remark that "Americans would prefer to omit the salt" is a small piece of period food politics: crispness was the American ideal, while the salted, softened, vinegar-soaked cucumber was recognizably foreign.