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Boiled Cucumbers
Old cucumbers may be pared, cut in pieces, cooked until soft in boiling salted water, drained, mashed, and seasoned, with butter, salt, and pepper.
A one-sentence recipe that treats the cucumber as a squash rather than a salad vegetable. The whole thing hinges on managing water.
- "Old" cucumbersThis means cucumbers left on the vine until the skin toughens, the flesh pales and the seeds harden — a condition home gardeners still meet in August. Supermarket slicing cucumbers are picked young; a large, slightly yellowing field cucumber or an overgrown garden one is the right thing here.
- Seed the piecesFielder's choice in the original, but old cucumbers have woody seeds that will not mash. Halve lengthwise and scrape the seed cavity out with a spoon before cutting into chunks.
- The hinge is drainageCucumber is over 95 percent water and will turn to soup in the pan. Drain hard in a colander, press with the back of a spoon, then return the mash to a dry pan over low heat and stir until the excess steam has gone before adding butter.
- Cooking timeSix to ten minutes in boiling salted water, until a piece gives with no resistance. There is no advantage to longer; the flavour is delicate and boils away.
- SeasoningButter, salt and pepper as written, but the mash takes well to a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream, both plausible period finishes for a boiled vegetable.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. As a rough guide, two large old cucumbers will give something like two cups of mash after draining — enough for three or four as a side.
Boiling and mashing cucumbers looks odd now, but for most of the nineteenth century the cucumber was regarded with some suspicion raw; cookbooks and medical writers of the period repeatedly warned that it was cold, indigestible and best cooked. Recipes for cucumbers stewed, stuffed, fried in batter or dressed like marrow appear throughout English and American household books, and this terse entry sits at the tail end of that tradition — a thrift note as much as a recipe, aimed at the gardener with a glut of oversized fruit that has gone past its use in salad or pickle. Its brevity, tucked into the vegetable chapter without ceremony, may suggest the technique was expected to be familiar and needed only a reminder that the woody late-season cucumber was not to be thrown away.