Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fried Cucumbers
Fried Cucumbers
Select two or three cucumbers; cut into thick slices and remove the seeds; then place them in a deep dish with salted water slightly acidulated with vinegar and let them soak for about an hour. Take them out and dry and drain on a cloth, then fry in boiling lard until a light brown; drain, and they are ready for use. They are generally used for brown stews.
A simple garnish-and-side preparation from the Waldorf's line kitchen, written for cooks who already knew what "boiling lard" looked like. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: dry them properlyThe slices come out of the soak wet, and wet cucumber dropped into hot fat will spit and steam rather than brown. The recipe says to dry and drain on a cloth; press them between cloths or paper until the surface is genuinely dry, not merely blotted.
- "Boiling lard"Lard does not boil at frying heat; the phrase is period shorthand for fat hot enough to fry briskly, in modern terms somewhere in the ordinary deep-frying range of about 350-375F. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point works, though lard gives the period flavour.
- Thick slicesRead this as half an inch or a little more. Thinner rounds collapse into limpness before they colour, which defeats the point of the exercise.
- Cucumbers of the periodThe instruction to scoop out the seeds suggests large, thick-skinned, seedy field cucumbers rather than the modern seedless or English types, which need no seeding; ridged or Kirby types are the closest match.
- The acidulated soakSalted water with a splash of vinegar draws out moisture and firms the flesh. "Slightly acidulated" means just that: a spoonful of vinegar in a quart of well-salted water is enough.
- PeelingNot mentioned either way, so it is left to the cook. Waxed supermarket skins toughen in the pan and are worth removing.
- Yield and useThe recipe gives no yield; two or three cucumbers make a modest quantity of garnish. All the text says is that they are "generally used for brown stews."
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a working record of what a large hotel kitchen actually turned out, and entries like this one are less finished dishes than components kept ready for the garnish station. Cooked cucumber, now unfamiliar in American kitchens, was ordinary in nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic: stewed, stuffed, glazed, or fried and set around a ragout, treated much as one would treat a summer squash. The salt-and-vinegar soak follows the older conviction that cucumbers were cold and watery and needed drawing before they could be safely eaten, a belief generally traced to humoral dietetics and long outliving the theory behind it. The instruction that they are "generally used for brown stews" is the tell that this is a brigade note rather than a home recipe.