No. 2733

Cucumbers Glazed

Concombres Glaces

Split some cucumbers crosswise into two-inch pieces, having them an inch and a half in diameter, and each of these lengthways and across to obtain four quarters; peel and remove the seeds; pare them into the shape of cloves, add garlic, and cook in salted water; drain, wipe on a cloth, and put them in a thin sautoir with melted butter to reduce their humidity, then pour off the butter, and moisten with some gravy (No. 404), letting this fall to a glaze.

← No. 2732 Cucumbers Fried, Breaded English Style and F Tomatoes, Corn & Garden Vegetables No. 2734 Cucumbers Stuffed →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade that already knows how to turn a vegetable and keeps a stockpot at the ready. Two things carry this dish: the shaping, and stopping the reduction at the point where the glaze coats rather than scorches.

The hinge: watch the glaze, not the clockOnce the gravy is added the pan needs constant attention and frequent swirling. A thin glaze can go from syrupy to scorched very quickly, so judge it by eye rather than by a set time.
"Pared into the shape of cloves"He means garlic cloves, not the spice: each quarter is trimmed to a plump, tapered, slightly curved wedge with the edges rounded off. This is ordinary tournage, and the point is that identical pieces cook at the same rate.
"Add garlic"The phrase sits oddly here, and may well be a fragment of "the shape of cloves of garlic" rather than a separate direction. If taken as an instruction, a crushed clove or two in the salted cooking water is one possible reading, with the garlic discarded rather than served.
SautoirA shallow, straight-sided pan with a wide base, not a deep saucepan. Surface area is the whole point here, since the first butter stage is purely about driving off water.
Gravy No. 404In The Epicurean this is a reduced brown gravy (jus) built on beef and veal, richer than pan gravy. A good unsalted reduced brown stock or veal jus stands in; anything already salted will concentrate into something far too salty as it falls to a glaze.
Blanching timeCucumber quarters of this size need roughly three to five minutes in salted water, until barely tender. Take them out while they still have resistance, because they get two more heatings in the pan.
Pouring off the butterDo it properly and wipe the pan if it has browned. Butterfat left behind will break the glaze into a greasy film instead of a lacquer.
YieldThe recipe gives none. As a garnish, roughly one medium cucumber for two people is a workable estimate. Glazed vegetables of this kind were commonly sent out alongside a roast or braise.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer cooked at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house's working repertoire set down in numbered form, with cross-references to the stocks and sauces that hold it together. Cooked cucumber, which strikes most modern American cooks as odd, was entirely routine in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where it was treated as a mild summer vegetable in the same family as marrow and braised lettuce rather than as a salad ingredient. Glazing vegetables in reduced meat stock, so that they emerge shining and coated, was the standard finish for a garnish destined to ring a platter of meat, and the technique long outlasted the fashion for the cucumber itself.