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Cucumber Sauce
Cut into very small pieces some peeled cucumbers. Stew gently until done, in a stewpan with a little stock, one-half tablespoon of vinegar, some salt, cayenne and a little celery essence. Celery salt may be used in place of plain salt if preferred. (A bit of boiled onion and a little butter may be added also, if desired.) Strain through a sieve.
A thin vegetable purée in the French style, meant to be spooned over poached fish or boiled meat rather than used as a salad dressing. Almost every quantity is left to the cook, so taste as you go.
- CucumbersTwo medium cucumbers, peeled and diced small, give roughly a cup of finished sauce — enough for about four servings. The recipe calls only for peeling, but seeding the dice, then salting them for 15 minutes and draining, helps keep the sauce from going watery.
- "A little stock"Read this as 1/4 to 1/3 cup, just enough to keep the pan from catching. Fish stock or a light chicken stock both work; the cucumbers release plenty of their own liquid once they soften.
- Celery essenceA bottled flavouring extract of the period, rarely met with under that name today. Half a teaspoon of celery seed tied in a scrap of cheesecloth, simmered with the cucumbers and then removed, is a reasonable substitute. Celery salt, which the recipe offers as an alternative, is ground celery seed mixed with salt — if you use it, cut the plain salt back.
- StewpanAny small heavy saucepan. "Stew gently until done" means a bare simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, until the dice collapse under a spoon.
- StrainingThe sieve is doing the work of a food mill: press the solids through with the back of a ladle so the pulp goes into the sauce and only skin flecks and seeds stay behind. Discarding the solids leaves you with flavoured stock, not sauce.
- Butter and onionThe recipe adds the optional butter along with the onion during the stewing; whisking it in off the heat at the end is an alternative if you want a glossier finish. The "bit of boiled onion" means onion already cooked soft, not raw.
- ConsistencyIf it is looser than you want after straining, reduce it briefly over moderate heat rather than adding flour, which would flatten the flavour.
- ServingServe warm with salmon, halibut, boiled mutton or cold poached fish. It thickens slightly as it cools and separates on standing, so whisk before serving.
Cucumber often appears in two guises in the sauce chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks: raw, sliced into vinegar as a relish for salmon in the English manner, and cooked down like this into a smooth stewed purée in the French manner. The Butterick book leans on the second tradition — the coulis of a soft vegetable bound with a little butter, strained smooth, thinned with stock. Cooked cucumber was far more common on nineteenth-century tables than it is now, stewed as a vegetable in its own right or dressed with cream. The optional "celery essence" is a marker of its date: bottled flavouring extracts were widely advertised around 1900, and recipe writers cheerfully offered them alongside other prepared seasonings such as celery salt.