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Cucumbers, Stewed
Select rather large cucumbers, peel them, cut them into halves lengthwise and then into quarters. Lay them in a shallow pan, cover with boiling salted water and stew gently for twenty minutes. When done, lay them carefully on toasted bread, and pour over them this sauce: Two tablespoons of butter; one-half pint of boiling water; one-half lemon; one tablespoon of flour; one-half teaspoon of salt and a dash of pepper. Place one-half of the butter in a stewpan and when melted add the flour. Cook, but do not brown, and when quite smooth add the boiling water. Simmer gently for about ten minutes, stirring all the time, then add the rest of the butter and the seasoning and serve at once.
A plain velouté-style sauce over stewed cucumber on toast, from an era when cucumber was as often cooked as eaten raw. The recipe assumes the large, thick-skinned, seedy cucumbers of a kitchen garden.
- The cucumbersField or slicing cucumbers about 8 inches long are closest to what is meant; scoop out the seed core with a spoon after quartering, since large seeds turn watery and bitter. English or Persian cucumbers will collapse well before twenty minutes.
- Twenty minutes is a maximumModern cucumbers are generally thinner-walled than the large garden stock this was written for. Start testing at eight to ten minutes; the pieces should be translucent and yield to a knife tip but still hold their shape. Stewed past that they slump into pulp.
- Drain thoroughlyThe hinge of the dish. Cucumber is mostly water, and any liquid clinging to it will thin the sauce and turn the toast to paste within a minute. Lift the pieces out and let them sit on a cloth briefly before plating.
- Half a pintOne cup (240 ml) of boiling water for one tablespoon of flour and two tablespoons of butter — a deliberately loose sauce, closer to a broth than a gravy. If you want it to coat, use three-quarters of a cup.
- The half lemonThe original never says what to do with it. Juice is the sensible reading: add it at the end with the second half of the butter, off the heat, so the sauce is not boiled after acidulation. Roughly a tablespoon.
- Cooking the flour"Cook, but do not brown" means about a minute of gentle bubbling to lose the raw taste — a white roux. Add the water while it is genuinely boiling and whisk, or it will lump.
- Salted waterSeason the stewing water properly, about a teaspoon of salt per quart; cucumber absorbs almost nothing otherwise and the finished dish tastes flat despite the seasoned sauce.
- Yield and servingThis quantity of sauce will cover enough cucumber for roughly four as a side dish. Use sturdy bread, toasted dry and dark, and sauce it at the last moment as the recipe directs.
Stewed cucumber belongs to a long English and American tradition of treating the vegetable as something to be cooked rather than sliced raw — it appears boiled, fried in batter, stuffed and stewed throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery, partly because garden cucumbers grew large, tough and seedy before the thin-skinned greenhouse varieties became common. Raw cucumber also carried a lingering reputation as indigestible and "cold" in the old humoral sense, advice repeated in household manuals well into the 1800s, and cooking was thought to correct it. The dish here is built on the standard butter-flour-liquid sauce that runs through the whole vegetable chapter of a book like this one; the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in the same spirit of practical instruction for a middle-class household, where serving vegetables on toast stretched a small quantity into a course.