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Stuffed Cucumbers
Pare three cucumbers, cut in halves crosswise, remove seeds, and let stand in cold water thirty minutes. Drain, wipe, and fill with force-meat, using recipe for Chicken Force-meat I or II, substituting veal for chicken. Place upright on a trivet in a saucepan. Half surround with White Stock, cover, and cook forty minutes. Place on thin slices of dry toast, cut in circular shapes, and pour around one and one-half cups Béchamel Sauce. Serve as a vegetable course or an entrée.
Fried Eggplant I Pare an egg-plant and cut in very thin slices. Sprinkle slices with salt and pile on a plate. Cover with a weight to express the juice, and let stand one and one-half hours. Dredge with flour and sauté slowly in butter until crisp and brown. Eggplant is in season from September to February.
A gentle braise rather than a bake: the stuffed cucumber halves stand upright in a covered saucepan and steam in stock. Note that the page runs straight into a second, unrelated recipe for Fried Eggplant, which is not part of the dish.
- The hinge: keep them upright and half-submergedStock should come no more than halfway up the cucumbers so the tops steam while the bottoms simmer. Fully submerged, the forcemeat leaches and the cucumber goes to mush. A folded round of foil or a small steamer insert stands in for the trivet.
- Forcemeat, in practiceFarmer's chicken forcemeats are pounded raw-meat mixtures bound with egg white and cream, close to a quenelle mixture; the recipe offers a choice of two versions (I or II), which differ, and neither is printed on this page. Substituting veal, roughly 3/4 lb ground veal, 1 egg white, 1/3 to 1/2 cup cream, salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg, beaten cold in a food processor, is a workable modern approximation.
- White stockA pale unroasted veal or chicken stock. Any light, unsalted chicken stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced stocks, which will tint the finished dish.
- Béchamel, 1896 senseFarmer's Béchamel is half white stock and half milk thickened with butter and flour, not the pure milk sauce of modern usage. One and a half cups is the full amount for six halves.
- Choose the right cucumberA firm field or Kirby cucumber holds its shape; long English cucumbers are too watery and thin-walled to stand up to forty minutes of heat. Three cucumbers give six halves; the recipe states no yield, so reckon one or two halves a head depending on whether it goes out as a vegetable course or an entree.
- Timing checkForty minutes is generous by modern taste. The veal filling wants to be firm at the centre (160F, the USDA figure for ground veal), which will likely take less; test one at 25 minutes.
- The toast roundsCut circles from dry white bread with a cutter slightly wider than the cucumber, and toast them hard. Soft toast dissolves under the sauce.
- On the eggplant that followsThe book gives the salting and weighting as a way to express the juice; the familiar bitterness explanation is a later gloss, and modern cultivars are rarely bitter in any case. Thirty minutes still improves texture and cuts oil absorption. Saute gently in butter, as directed, and expect to add more as the slices drink it.
Stuffed cucumbers belong to the late-nineteenth-century American appetite for French service in the domestic kitchen, and the technique here is straight out of the classical repertoire: a hollowed vegetable filled with a cream-and-egg-white forcemeat, poached in white stock, napped with a flour-thickened white sauce, and set on a fried or toasted crouton to keep the plate from flooding. Fannie Farmer's book is full of these small translations, forcemeat and Bechamel presented as ordinary household work rather than restaurant cooking. Cucumbers cooked rather than eaten raw were unremarkable then and are unusual now; Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks routinely stewed, stuffed, fried and dressed them hot, partly out of a widespread period belief that raw cucumber was hard to digest. The closing note that eggplant runs from September to February is itself a period marker, from an era before greenhouse and imported produce flattened the vegetable calendar.