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Cucumbers and Tomatoes
Take two earthenware pots and put some tomatoes to stew in one, in water, pepper, and salt. Peel a cucumber, open it, remove the seeds and stuff it with any forcemeat that you have; but a white one is best. Let it cook gently in some brown stock, well covered over. When tender put the cucumber along the dish and tomatoes on each side. A puree of potatoes can surround them.
A braise of stuffed cucumber served with stewed tomatoes, from the wartime Belgian repertoire. The instructions assume you already know how to make a forcemeat and how to keep an earthenware pot from cracking.
- The hinge: gentle heat, tight lidCucumber collapses into water the moment it boils hard. Keep the stock at a bare tremble, lid on, until a skewer meets no resistance — roughly 30 to 40 minutes for a thick cucumber, less for a slim one.
- Earthenware potsTwo earthenware vessels are called for. A heavy lidded saucepan or a small enamelled cast-iron pot does the same job; if you use real earthenware on gas, put a diffuser under it.
- "A white one is best"This refers to the forcemeat, not the cucumber. A white forcemeat means veal, chicken or lean pork pounded with a panade of bread soaked in milk, bound with egg, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg. Roughly 8 oz of forcemeat fills one large cucumber.
- Choosing the cucumberThe recipe assumes a fat ridge or greenhouse cucumber that can be halved lengthways, hollowed and refilled. A slicing cucumber of 10 to 12 inches works; the thin-skinned Persian and Lebanese sorts are too slight to stuff.
- Cook the stuffing throughSince the filling is raw meat, treat this as you would a meatloaf: 165F at the centre. The cucumber will be tender by then in any case.
- Brown stockA dark veal or beef stock, reduced and unthickened. 'Well covered over' may refer to the pot's lid or to the stock covering the cucumber; if you use only enough to come halfway up, the liquid concentrates into a sauce as it cooks.
- The tomatoesStewed in water, pepper and salt they will be thin. Cook them uncovered for the last stretch so the liquid boils away, or start with peeled halved tomatoes and no added water at all.
- YieldOne large stuffed cucumber, cut across into thick rounds, serves two as a main course or four as part of a larger meal. The potato puree around the edge of the dish is not optional decoration; it is what makes it dinner.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War from recipes sent or dictated by Belgian refugees in Britain, and sold in aid of relief work — which explains the book's habit of describing a dish in a few brisk lines and assuming the reader can fill in the rest. Stuffed cucumber belongs to a broad northern European family of braised stuffed vegetables, cousin to stuffed marrow and to the cucumber ragouts that appear in French and Flemish cookery through the nineteenth century; cooked cucumber was ordinary kitchen practice well before it became almost exclusively a salad vegetable in the English-speaking world. The composed presentation here — a central braised item flanked by a stewed vegetable and ringed with potato puree — is straightforward bourgeois plating of the period.