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Cucumbers a La Creme
6 Cucumbers, Medium Size 1/2 Cups of Cream Sauce Pare and quarter or dice the cucumbers. Remove the seeds and soak for half an hour or until crisp in cold water.
Put into saucepan and cover with boiling water, add teaspoon of salt; boil thirty minutes or until tender. Drain and add sauce, allowing it to cook a moment or two in the sauce.
A plain cooked-cucumber dish of the sort that vanished from American tables after the 1920s. Two things need attention: the quantity of sauce as printed, and a boiling time that will reduce the cucumbers to pulp.
- The sauce quantity is garbledThe sauce quantity as printed is odd -- "1/2 Cups of Cream Sauce" for six cucumbers reads like a dropped leading numeral (the plural "Cups" suggests as much), and 1 1/2 cups would be about what six medium cucumbers take. Half a cup would barely coat them.
- Cream sauce means white sauceNot cream reduced on its own -- in cookbooks of this kind it is generally a medium bechamel, about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 1/2 cups milk, or half milk and half cream, cooked out and seasoned with salt and white pepper; a scrape of nutmeg is optional.
- Thirty minutes is far too longCucumber is roughly 95 percent water and collapses quickly. Simmer the pieces 6 to 10 minutes, until translucent and just yielding to a knife tip, then drain well. Thirty minutes gives a grey mush that waters down the sauce.
- Drain harder than you thinkEven briefly boiled cucumber holds a lot of liquid. Let the drained pieces stand in the colander a few minutes, or spread them on a towel, or the sauce will thin out in the pan.
- The cold-water soakThe half-hour soak firms the flesh and is worth doing, though the effect is modest with modern thin-skinned varieties. Salting the cut pieces for 20 minutes and rinsing draws out more water and does more good.
- Seeds and peelOld field cucumbers had tough skins and large hard seeds, hence the paring and seeding. English or Persian cucumbers need neither; halve them lengthwise and cut into thick half-moons.
- YieldSix medium cucumbers serve six as a vegetable side. Serve at once, in a warmed dish, with the pepper and a little chopped parsley or dill added at the end.
Cooked cucumber, now nearly forgotten in American home cooking, was routine in nineteenth-century kitchens, where cucumbers were a field crop harvested large and often too coarse to eat raw with pleasure. Stewing, frying and dressing them in white sauce were all standard treatments, and the French-tinged label "à la crème" was applied freely in period cookbooks to almost any vegetable finished in béchamel — the same formula covered onions, celery, potatoes and peas. Bride's cookbooks of the early twentieth century were sold as starter manuals for young women setting up a first household, so their vegetable chapters lean on a small stock of sauces applied over and over; learning one cream sauce unlocked a dozen entries. The long boiling times these books specify reflect both older, tougher produce and a general period conviction that vegetables should be cooked thoroughly, a habit that outlasted the produce that justified it.