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Cucumber Salad
Cut about an inch off the point of each cucumber, and pare carefully. Slice very thin, sprinkle with a little salt, and let stand ten minutes. Serve with French dressing.
A three-line recipe that depends almost entirely on the salting step and on the kind of cucumber you buy. Both have changed since 1911.
- Why cut off the pointOlder field cucumbers could carry bitter cucurbitacins, usually said to gather near the stem end and just under the skin; trimming an inch off an end was a common way to deal with it, though the recipe does not say why. Modern greenhouse and burpless varieties are bred to have much less of it, so the trim is largely optional.
- Choosing the cucumberAn English or Persian cucumber gives thin skin, few seeds and no need for peeling. A standard American slicer is usually waxed and should be peeled as directed.
- The salt is the hingeSalting draws water out so the dressing is not diluted into a pool. Ten minutes is the minimum; twenty to thirty in a colander is better. Drain well and blot dry before dressing, and do not rinse unless you have been heavy-handed with the salt.
- Slicing thin"Very thin" here means translucent, the work of a mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor. Thick slices weep unevenly and stay watery in the middle.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled stuff. In this period it means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine; proportions varied from about equal parts to three or four parts oil to one of vinegar. Season the dressing lightly, since the cucumbers are already salted.
- TimingDress at the last moment. Cucumbers salted and dressed in advance collapse and go limp within the hour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two medium cucumbers would serve about four as a side salad.
Salted and drained cucumber in a vinegar dressing is one of the oldest forms of the vegetable on a European table, and English and American cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often instruct that cucumbers be sliced, salted and drained before dressing — partly for texture, partly because the older varieties were genuinely bitter and were widely, if wrongly, suspected of being indigestible or unwholesome. The Butterick Cook Book, published by the pattern company for a middle-class household audience, is characteristically brisk about it: the recipe simply refers the cook to French dressing, which suggests it was treated as a standing preparation the cook already knew, so that the recipe need only say when to reach for it. That assumption — that a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing is basic kitchen equipment rather than a recipe in itself — is a fair marker of how home cooking was taught in the period.