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Cucumber Cups
This makes a dainty dish for luncheon. Cut the unpeeled vegetables into sections two inches long and cook until tender in water salted just before cooking is completed. Scoop out the center of each section, leaving one-half-inch thickness all around the sides, as well as on the bottom, thus making pretty green cups of the vegetable. These cups may be filled with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms or any other filling, held together with white sauce.
A hollowed vegetable case for creamed leftovers, from the era when a lady's luncheon meant something small, pale and held together with white sauce. The technique is sound; the details need updating.
- Pick the right cucumberThe recipe assumes an unwaxed garden cucumber with edible skin. Supermarket slicing cucumbers are usually waxed and should be avoided here; use unwaxed Kirby, Persian or English cucumbers, straight and at least an inch and a half thick so the cups have walls.
- Salt at the end, as writtenThe instruction to salt only as cooking finishes is explicit in the recipe. The reason is not given; the usual argument is that salting the water early softens the flesh, and you want the cucumber firm enough to hold its shape when hollowed.
- TimingThe recipe says only "until tender." For two-inch sections at a bare simmer, expect roughly 6 to 8 minutes; cucumber goes from tender to translucent mush quickly. Test with a skewer at the side wall, not the centre.
- HollowingCook the sections whole and scoop after, while just cool enough to handle. A melon baller or a grapefruit spoon works better than a knife. Half an inch of wall is the minimum that will stand up on a plate.
- Drain them properlyThis is the hinge. Cooked cucumber is mostly water and will weep into the filling within minutes. Invert the cups on a folded towel for five minutes, and season the insides lightly before filling.
- The white sauceThe recipe gives no proportions. A standard white sauce is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked out for a couple of minutes so it does not taste of raw flour; increase the butter and flour to make it stiff enough to bind a filling.
- SweetbreadsNot a casual purchase now. They need ordering from a butcher, several hours of soaking in cold water, then blanching and peeling before they go anywhere near a cream sauce. Cooked chicken, crab or sauteed mushrooms are the practical fillings.
- Yield and servingA standard cucumber gives three or four cups; allow two or three per person as a light lunch course. Fill just before serving.
Butterick, the dress-pattern company, published household books as a natural extension of its magazines for women, and the tone of this entry "a dainty dish for luncheon" places it precisely in the early-twentieth-century world of the ladies' luncheon, where food was expected to be small, pale, and arranged. Cooked cucumber, which strikes modern cooks as odd, was entirely ordinary in nineteenth-century English and American kitchens: it was stewed, stuffed, fried in slices and served in white sauce long before the raw salad cucumber took over the vegetable's reputation. The edible container is the other period signature. Hollowed tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes and cucumbers all served as cases for creamed chicken, sweetbreads and mushrooms, dishes that let a cook present yesterday's meat as something new without admitting it, and that suited the chafing dish and the small formal meal equally well.