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Cucumber Salad
Take three medium-sized cucumbers, lay them on ice until thoroughly chilled, then pare, taking care to leave no trace of the green skin, a very small bit of which would be enough to spoil the salad. Slice the cucumbers very thinly and arrange them in a glass dish or shallow bowl; mix together half a teaspoonful of ground white pepper and one teaspoonful of salt, and sprinkle this over and among them; then mix one tablespoonful of vinegar with two tablespoonfuls of the best salad oil and pour it over.
A plain oil-and-vinegar cucumber salad from the Waldorf's kitchen, dressed at the last minute. Two details carry it: cucumbers cold enough to stay crisp, and skin pared away completely.
- Why the skin mattersOscar's warning is not fussiness. The older field cucumbers of 1896 carried cucurbitacin in and just under the peel, which is genuinely bitter. Modern greenhouse and English varieties are bred nearly free of it, so a thin-skinned cucumber can be left unpeeled if you prefer; taste a slice from the stem end first, since that is where any bitterness concentrates.
- "Lay them on ice"The point is thorough chilling before slicing, which keeps the cells firm. An hour in the coldest part of the refrigerator does the same work; ice water for 20 minutes is quicker.
- Slicing"Very thinly" means translucent — a mandoline or the thin slot of a box grater. Thick coins will sit in a puddle rather than absorbing the dressing.
- Salt and drainageA full teaspoon of salt on three cucumbers draws out a surprising amount of water within ten minutes. Either serve immediately, as written, or salt the slices separately, drain 20 minutes, pat dry and then dress — the second route gives a firmer, less watery salad but you should cut the salt back sharply.
- "Best salad oil"In the 1890s this usually meant olive oil, mild and clean-tasting rather than a peppery modern extra-virgin, though other oils were also sold as salad oil. The recipe's ratio works out at one part vinegar to two of oil, sharper than the more usual one to three; a plain white wine vinegar suits it better than cider or balsamic.
- White pepperPale slices show no black specks, which is the usual reason cooks of the period reached for it. Ground white pepper is prone to a musty note, so use a fresh jar or grind it yourself.
- YieldThree cucumbers dress four to six as a side salad. Assemble no more than a few minutes before it goes to the table.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book is a compendium of the international hotel repertoire of the 1890s as much as it is a record of one kitchen. A dressed cucumber salad like this belongs to the plain end of that repertoire — the cool, sharp thing set beside a heavy roast or fried fish, and a formula broadly comparable to what German kitchens serve, in various forms, as Gurkensalat. The insistence on removing every trace of green skin reflects the cucumbers of the period rather than any culinary theory: nineteenth-century varieties were commonly bitter near the peel, and cucumbers had a long-standing reputation as indigestible, which such techniques as peeling hard, salting and draining, and serving them very cold are often said to have been meant to manage. Modern breeding has largely removed the problem the instruction was written to solve.