No. 2661

Cucumber Salad, English Style

Salade de Concombres a l'Anglaise

Select the tenderest cucumbers, peel off the rind, slice the interior finely, and lay them in a dish, sprinkle over some fine salt, and let macerate for fifteen minutes; season them, after straining off the liquid, with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, adding some chopped parsley.

English Style.—The same, only add a very finely minced onion.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A two-line recipe that depends almost entirely on the salting step. Ranhofer's cucumbers were thick-skinned, seedy field varieties, so a few of his instructions read differently with modern produce.

The hinge: salt and drainFifteen minutes under salt draws out enough water that the dressing clings instead of pooling. Press the slices gently in a colander and pour off the liquid before dressing; do not rinse, or you lose the seasoning along with the water.
"Slice the interior finely"Most likely just the peeled flesh, once the rind is off; he never actually says to remove the seed core, though a mature field cucumber would have a watery one worth cutting away. Slice about 1/8 inch thick.
PeelingWorth doing on waxed supermarket cucumbers, where the skin is tough and bitter. Unwaxed thin-skinned varieties can be left unpeeled.
The dressing proportionsNone are given; the recipe says only "oil and vinegar." The conventional nineteenth-century proportion is about three parts oil to one of vinegar, which for two medium cucumbers works out to roughly 3 tablespoons oil and 1 tablespoon wine vinegar.
OilIn an 1894 salad recipe, "oil" meant olive oil. A grassy modern extra-virgin will dominate the cucumber.
The onion"Very finely minced" is the operative phrase — a tablespoon at most, cut fine enough to disappear. Rinsing the minced onion in cold water and blotting it takes the harsh edge off.
Salt twice, carefullyThe recipe salts for maceration and then seasons again. Taste before the second salting; drained cucumber often needs very little.
Yield and timingTwo medium cucumbers serve four as a side. Dress within half an hour of serving; held longer, the slices go limp and shed water again.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working encyclopedia of the French repertoire as practiced in an American kitchen. Here the plain dressing and the "English style" version sit in a single entry, the latter differing only by a very finely minced onion. The association of raw onion with English rather than French cucumber salad is a distinction period cookery writing does draw, though how widely it was actually observed is hard to document. The salting step, which Ranhofer gives without comment, appears in many nineteenth-century cookery books, and field-grown cucumbers of the period were generally wetter and more bitter than modern thin-skinned greenhouse varieties.