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Cucumber Cups with Lettuce
Pare cucumbers, cut in quarters crosswise, remove centres from pieces, arrange on lettuce leaves, and fill cups with Sauce Tartare (see p. 277).
A two-line assembly recipe of the sort Fannie Farmer used to fill out a salad chapter. Everything depends on the cucumber holding its shape and the sauce being good, so the work is really in the prep.
- The hinge: drain the cupsHollowed cucumber weeps steadily and will thin the sauce into a puddle on the plate. Salt the insides lightly, invert on a rack or towel for 20 to 30 minutes, then blot dry before filling.
- Cucumber choiceThe book says to pare, which suits the thick-skinned field cucumbers common in its day. A long English or Persian cucumber gives a firmer wall and fewer seeds; if you use a waxed supermarket cucumber, peeling is still necessary.
- "Cut in quarters crosswise"This means four crosswise sections from one cucumber, each roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches tall, not lengthwise quarters. Trim the bottoms flat so they stand.
- Removing the centresA melon baller or an apple corer works; leave at least 1/4 inch of wall or the cup collapses when filled. Stop short of cutting through the base.
- Sauce Tartare in this bookThe cross-referenced sauce is mayonnaise-based, typically with chopped pickles, capers and herbs, and the mayonnaise starts from a raw yolk. It will be eaten uncooked, so use very fresh eggs or a pasteurized-egg mayonnaise if serving children, elderly guests or anyone pregnant.
- Serve cold, serve soonChill the cups and the sauce separately and fill just before they go to the table. Filled cups held more than half an hour go slack and watery.
- Yield and place in the mealOne medium cucumber gives four cups, so figure one or two per person as a first course or as the salad alongside a fish dinner, which is where the tartare sauce points.
Cucumber cups belong to the era of the composed salad course, when American cookery took its cues from French service and a salad was expected to be built rather than tossed. Hollowed vegetables and fruits used as edible containers — tomato cases, orange baskets, pepper rings — fill the salad chapters of turn-of-the-century books, and Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) treats them as a matter of course, often with nothing more than a cross-reference to a sauce elsewhere in the volume. Tartare sauce was most often served with fish in this period, which suggests a place for these cups alongside a fish course. The recipe's brevity is also characteristic: the instruction here is essentially a plating diagram.