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Fried Cucumbers
Pare cucumbers and cut lengthwise in one-third inch slices. Dry between towels, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain.
A four-line method that assumes a cook already knows Farmer's standing directions for crumbing and deep frying. The details worth pinning down are the frying temperature and the water in the cucumber.
- Fat temperatureFarmer's era judged deep fat by dropping in a cube of bread; the standard tests ran from about forty seconds (roughly 375-390F) for already-cooked mixtures to about sixty seconds (nearer 360-365F) for raw ones like these slices. Below about 350F the crumb coat absorbs oil before it sets.
- Drying is the hingeCucumber is over 95 percent water and will steam the coating off from the inside. Salt the slices, let them drain in a colander 20-30 minutes, then press dry between towels rather than just patting them once.
- Salting orderThe recipe salts after drying; if you salt first to draw out moisture, go lightly with additional salt in the crumbs.
- "Crumbs" means dried breadStale bread grated or rolled fine, not the coarse panko or seasoned crumbs on a supermarket shelf. Either works, but panko gives a much lighter, crisper shell.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe egg is beaten with a tablespoon or two of water or milk to thin it; undiluted egg sits in a thick layer and can slide away in the fat. Chilling the coated slices 15 minutes helps the shell hold.
- Batch sizeFry a few slices at a time. Crowding drops the fat temperature and, with a vegetable this wet, that is the difference between crisp and greasy.
- Cucumber choiceThe recipe's instruction to pare suggests a thicker-skinned, seedier cucumber than the modern seedless or English type, which holds together better and needs no seeding. Scoop the seed core from any cucumber with soft, watery centers.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; two medium cucumbers will make roughly four side servings. Serve immediately -- the coating softens within minutes.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats the cucumber as a vegetable to be cooked as well as one to be sliced raw, and this recipe sits among other cooked treatments that read oddly to readers who know cucumber only from a salad bowl. Nineteenth-century American medical opinion was suspicious of raw cucumber as indigestible -- the vegetable turns up repeatedly in period warnings about summer complaints -- and it is tempting to read cooking it as a response to that anxiety, though frying also made good use of an August glut in kitchen gardens. The crumb-egg-crumb sequence is Farmer's house method, set out in her general directions for frying and then invoked by name for everything from croquettes to eggplant; its repetition through the book illustrates how she built a system a beginner could follow rather than a collection of one-off dishes.