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Cucumber Cups
This makes a dainty dish for luncheon. The vegetable unpeeled is cut into sections two inches long and cooked until tender in boiling salted water. The center is then scooped out of each section, leaving one-half inch thickness all round the sides, as well as on the bottom, thus making pretty green cups of the vegetable. These cups are then filled with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms or any delicate white filling which has for a foundation white sauce.
CUCUMBERS, SAUTÉ-Boil for three minutes only, pared and quartered cucumbers. Drain the pieces and season with salt and pepper. Roll in flour, cook in butter in a saucepan for twenty minutes, and sprinkle with minced parsley or chives about five minutes before the cooking is finished.
Two related dishes: hollowed cucumber sections used as edible cases for a creamed filling, and a simple floured sauté. Both were written for the thick-skinned, seedy field cucumbers of the period, which behave differently from what is now sold.
- The hinge: undercook the cups"Cooked until tender" for a cucumber section means barely tender to the tip of a knife, roughly 4 to 6 minutes in boiling salted water. Cucumber is mostly water and collapses into a slack, grey shell if pushed past that point, and it will soften further while it holds hot filling.
- Choose the right cucumberThe recipe assumes a fat garden cucumber with a firm rind that can stand up as a cup. A standard American slicing cucumber works; a thin-skinned English or Persian cucumber is too slim and too fragile to hollow out. Aim for a diameter of at least two inches so a half-inch wall leaves a usable cavity.
- ScoopingA melon baller or a narrow teaspoon takes out the seed core cleanly once the sections are cooked and cool enough to handle. Drain the cups upside down on a towel for a few minutes before filling, or the water they release will thin the sauce.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are a special order from a butcher today. They need soaking, blanching, peeling of the membrane and pressing before they go into a cream sauce, none of which this page explains -- the technique is simply assumed. Creamed chicken or sautéed mushrooms in the same white sauce give the same effect with far less work.
- "Any delicate white filling"The foundation is a plain white sauce; the recipe gives no proportions, so use a standard one -- 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and white pepper. Keep it on the thick side, since the cucumber will let go of some liquid.
- The sauté, twenty minutesTwenty minutes in butter is far longer than modern practice; the length plausibly served to drive off water and colour the flour coating, though the recipe does not say so. Quartered cucumber pared and blanched three minutes will be soft and browned in 6 to 8 minutes over medium heat. If you follow the original timing, expect something much closer to a purée in the pan.
- Salt the quarters firstFor the sauté, sprinkling the blanched pieces with salt and letting them drain 10 minutes before flouring keeps the coating from turning to paste. Older cucumbers were often bitter near the stem end, which may be one reason paring was specified, though the recipe does not say.
- Yield and servingA large cucumber gives three or four two-inch cups; figure two cups per person as a luncheon course, served hot the moment they are filled. The sauté serves two to three from one large cucumber.
Stewed, fried and stuffed cucumbers appear steadily in English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, alongside the raw and pickled uses. What dates this page is the frame around it: the ladies' luncheon of the early 1900s, where a light course of something creamed and white, served in an edible case, was the expected thing. Books of the period offer creamed chicken in pastry shells, in bread cases, in scooped tomatoes and in green pepper halves, all of them carriers for the same basic white sauce. Butterick, a pattern and magazine company, published its cook book for a readership of home cooks who wanted the fashionable dish without a professional kitchen behind them, which is why sweetbreads are listed casually alongside mushrooms as though the two were equally near at hand.