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Small (Remove thick slices from both)
Remove thick slices from both ends and cut off a thick paring, as the cucumber contains a bitter principle, a large quantity of which lies near the skin and stem end. Cut in thin slices and keep in cold water until ready to serve. Drain, and cover with crushed ice for serving.
A preparation instruction rather than a composed dish: this is how the Boston Cooking School wanted cucumbers readied before they met a dressing. Most of it still holds, though modern cucumbers are a different vegetable from the ones Fannie Farmer knew.
- The bitter principleThe compound is cucurbitacin, concentrated in the peel and the stem end, and it is genuinely bitter. Field-grown and heirloom cucumbers still show it; supermarket English and Persian types have been bred for low cucurbitacin and rarely need such drastic trimming.
- How thick a paringThe recipe wants more than a thin peeler pass, and a substantial slice off each end; the stem end is the one it singles out as bitter. Taste a slice from that end before committing the whole cucumber.
- Slice thickness"Thin slices" here suggests near-translucent slices, which a mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater does more evenly than a knife.
- The cold water soakThe recipe leaves the slices in cold water only "until ready to serve"; twenty to thirty minutes in ice water is enough to firm them, while a long soak makes them waterlogged. Drain well.
- Crushed ice for servingThe ice is a period presentation device, chilling the slices at table before household refrigeration was reliable. A chilled bowl and a few minutes in the refrigerator do the same work without diluting the dressing.
- Salting insteadIf the cucumbers are watery, tossing the slices with salt for 20 minutes and draining will do more for texture than the water bath.
Fannie Farmer's cucumber notes sit in a period when the vegetable was often treated with suspicion: nineteenth-century American household writers frequently described cucumbers as indigestible, and the elaborate paring, soaking and icing described here may have been as much a corrective measure as a matter of taste. The "bitter principle" she names is real chemistry, later identified as the cucurbitacins, which are most concentrated in the skin and stem end of the fruit and vary with growing conditions such as heat and drought. Ice was the other half of the ritual: a well-supplied urban Boston kitchen of the period could generally rely on an icebox and regular ice delivery, and crushed ice under salads, oysters and melon was a visible sign of a well-run house. Later breeding has made much of the instruction unnecessary, which is why the paragraph reads as fussy today.