Home › Left-Over Vegetables › Stewed Cucumbers
Stewed Cucumbers
Use those which are too large and old to slice Pare them and cook in boiling salted water until tender. Slice in quarters lengthwise, and reheat in drawn butter sauce (see page 70) or white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). A dish similar to English vegetable marrow. coarse.
A method rather than a formula: overgrown cucumbers, boiled and dressed in a sauce. The original text has clearly suffered in transcription — the trailing "coarse." belongs to a sentence about large cucumbers being coarse when raw.
- Which cucumbersThis is for the ones that hid under the leaves and went yellow-green and fat, with tough skin and developed seeds. Pare deeply and scrape the seed cavity out with a spoon; mature seeds tend to stay hard and can taste bitter. Note that the recipe as written pares and boils them first and cuts them into quarters only afterwards.
- Don't overboilSalted water at a bare simmer until a knife goes in with slight resistance; the recipe says only "until tender," which for pieces of moderate thickness may be a matter of minutes and longer for very large old ones. Cucumber is mostly water and collapses into strings once it goes past tender. Drain well and let it steam dry for a minute, or the sauce will be thinned by the vegetable.
- Drawn butter sauceNot clarified butter, which is what the phrase means in a restaurant today. In American books of this period it is a flour-and-butter roux let down with hot water, seasoned, and finished with more butter — roughly 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of water, plus 2 more tablespoons of butter stirred in off the heat.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in books of this kind generally run from thin to thick, with No. 2 usually the medium pouring sauce -- commonly something in the region of 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, though the proportions on page 68 are the ones that govern. Season it more assertively than you think you need, since boiled cucumber brings nothing of its own.
- Vegetable marrowThe comparison is exact in spirit. Marrow is an overgrown summer squash treated as a vegetable in its own right, and English cookery of the period boiled and sauced it the same way. If you have picked up the habit of roasting marrow, the same treatment suits big cucumbers better than boiling does.
- Seasoning worth addingNutmeg, white pepper, a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chopped dill all sit naturally in the sauce and lift a bland vegetable. Dill in particular is the traditional partner in Northern and Eastern European versions of cooked cucumber.
- YieldTwo large field cucumbers, pared and seeded, serve three or four as a side dish with about a cup of sauce.
Cooked cucumber looks odd now, but it was once ordinary. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cucumbers were commonly stewed, fried in slices, or stuffed and braised, partly because raw cucumbers were widely held to be indigestible — the old sayings about cucumbers being fit only to be dressed and thrown away belong to that suspicion. The premise here is a home garden rather than a shop: nobody sells a cucumber this far gone, but any household growing its own will find several every August, and this is what to do with them.