Cucumbers
1. Serve them most of the time plain sliced with only pounded ice strewn over. 2. Make a salad by mixing with the thin sliced cucumbers a few slices of onions and pouring over vinegar to cover, with pepper and salt. 3. Make a cucumber salad by pouring a salad dressing over the cucumbers, and use sliced tomatoes to garnish the dishes.
Let him carry home his leeks and shake his flanks over his wool-beating; he'll mend matters more that way. The taxes that harm him most are his heavy carcass and his idleness. --Romola.
Three brief service notes rather than a formal recipe, written for a hotel cook who needed to put cucumbers on a table quickly. A few conventions behind them have shifted.
- Pounded iceBefore mechanical refrigeration, a block was broken up in a canvas bag with a mallet and the shards strewn over sliced cucumbers to chill them at the table. Crushed ice does the same job; drain the slices before serving so the plate does not flood as it melts.
- Slice thin, and salt if you likeCucumbers of the period were commonly pared before slicing; the recipe itself says only 'thin sliced'. Modern English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling. Salting the slices for 20-30 minutes and pressing out the liquid keeps a dressed salad from turning watery, though the original does not ask for it.
- "Vinegar to cover"This is closer to a quick pickle than a vinaigrette. The recipe does not say which vinegar. Undiluted it will read as very sharp to a modern palate; diluting it with water or adding a little sugar is one way to soften it.
- "A salad dressing" in this book"A salad dressing" -- in American cookery of this period that generally means either a boiled dressing thickened with egg and mustard or a hand-beaten mayonnaise, rather than anything bottled. Either suits the tomato garnish.
- OnionsThe recipe does not specify a variety or thickness; a mild onion sliced paper thin suits the dish, and a rinse in cold water takes the bite off if the onion is strong.
- Yield and timingThe original gives neither. Reckon one medium cucumber as a side for two. Dressed versions are best assembled shortly before service; the sliced-with-ice version should go out immediately.
- The stray quotationThe lines credited to Romola at the end have nothing to do with cucumbers. Quotations of this kind often round out a page, though nothing here states why this one was chosen.
Cucumbers occupied an odd place in American eating at the turn of the twentieth century: widely grown and cheap in summer, yet persistently suspected of being indigestible, which is why so many books insist on soaking, icing or drowning them in vinegar before they reach the table. Jessup Whitehead wrote for the hotel and restaurant trade, and these notes read like kitchen shorthand rather than domestic instruction: what to send out when the order says cucumbers, in ascending order of effort. The acid-and-onion treatment in the second note is often likened to the German-influenced Gurkensalat said to be common in the American Midwest, while the third, with mayonnaise or boiled dressing and a tomato garnish, seems to reflect the newer fashion for composed salad plates in American hotel dining, though how early and how widely that fashion spread is uncertain.