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Cucumber Sauce II
Beat one-half cup heavy cream until stiff, and add onefourth teaspoon salt, few grains pepper, and gradually two tablespoons vinegar; then add one cucumber, pared, chopped, and drained. 3 cups celery, cut in thin slices
A cold whipped-cream sauce for poached salmon or other cold fish. It comes together in a few minutes, and the only real difficulty is keeping the cream from breaking when the vinegar goes in.
- The stray line"3 cups celery, cut in thin slices" -- has nothing to do with this sauce and appears to be a fragment of another recipe carried over in the text. Ignore it.
- Vinegar into whipped creamAdd the two tablespoons a few drops at a time, whisking between additions, or the acid will curdle the cream and the sauce will weep. The recipe says only "vinegar"; a plain cider or white wine vinegar suits it best, and nothing sweetened.
- Drain the cucumber hardA cucumber is mostly water, and any left behind will thin the sauce to soup within the hour. Chop it, toss with a pinch of salt, leave it in a sieve fifteen minutes, then press it dry in a towel before folding in.
- Cream then and now"Heavy cream" here means roughly 36 per cent butterfat, which modern heavy or whipping cream matches. Ultra-pasteurised cream can be less reliable to whip and holds acid less gracefully; standard pasteurised is the better buy if you can get it.
- ConsistencyThe recipe says to beat the cream stiff; in practice soft-to-medium peaks are easier to work with, since the salt, vinegar and cucumber all firm the mixture as they go in, and cream taken to full stiffness beforehand can turn grainy.
- Yield and servingSomething under two cups, enough for six or so portions of cold fish. Make it within an hour or two of serving and keep it refrigerated; it does not hold overnight.
Cold sauces built on whipped cream rather than mayonnaise or hollandaise were a fixture of the American cooking-school kitchen, and cucumber was their standard partner for salmon — a pairing English and American cookery had settled on long before Fannie Farmer set it down, on the reasoning that something cool and sharp cuts an oily fish. The Boston Cooking-School book gives more than one cucumber sauce, the numbered variants suggesting a kitchen that worked by permutation from a base technique.