No. 2734

Cucumbers Stuffed

Concombres Farcis

Peel the cucumbers and cut them in inch lengths; empty each piece with a vegetable spoon (Fig. 91), retaining a quarter of an inch at the bottom; blanch, then cook in consomme (No. 189) and drain. Fry a little onion in butter, add some chopped mushrooms, evaporate their humidity, then throw in some chopped truffles and parsley, also a little gravy (No. 404); simmer and add soaked and well-pressed bread-crumbs and raw egg-yolks. Stuff the cucumbers with this, stand them on a dish, bestrew the cucumbers with bread-crumbs and a little grated parmesan, pour over melted butter and finish cooking brown in a moderate oven. Dress in a vegetable dish on a little half-glaze sauce (No. 413).

← No. 2733 Cucumbers Glazed Tomatoes, Corn & Garden Vegetables No. 2735 Eggplant a la Duperret-Broiled →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's stuffed cucumbers are a duxelles-filled vegetable garnish from a professional kitchen where consommé, gravy and half-glaze were already standing on the stove. The whole dish hangs on getting the cucumber barrels tender but still able to stand up.

The hinge: blanch, then poach gentlyThe cucumber cylinders are blanched in salted water only until they lose their raw snap — two to three minutes — then poached in stock just until a knife tip slides in. Boiled hard they collapse into the filling and cannot be stood upright.
Choose the right cucumberUse straight, thick field cucumbers or the fat end of English cucumbers, peeled, cut into 1-inch lengths. Seedless varieties hollow out cleanly with a melon baller; very seedy supermarket cucumbers leave thin, weak walls.
Salt the cupsThe original does not say so, but salting the hollowed pieces for 15 minutes and blotting them draws out water that would otherwise thin the stuffing and pool in the dish.
Cross-references to other recipesNo. 189 is a plain consommé, No. 404 a meat gravy, No. 413 a demi-glace. Good chicken or beef stock stands in for the first two; for the sauce, reduce brown stock with a splash of Madeira until it coats a spoon.
"Evaporate their humidity"Cook the chopped mushrooms in butter over fairly high heat until the pan is dry and they squeak — this is a duxelles. Wet mushrooms make a filling that will not hold its shape under the gratin.
TrufflesFresh truffle is not required for the dish to work. A teaspoon of chopped preserved truffle, or simply more mushroom with a few drops of truffle-scented oil off the heat, keeps the balance right.
Raw egg yolk as binderThe yolks go in off the heat and set during the oven browning; one yolk binds roughly a cup of filling. The bread should be crustless white bread soaked in stock or milk and wrung nearly dry.
"A moderate oven"In practice around 350-375°F. Fifteen to twenty minutes is enough to set the filling and brown the crumb and parmesan; run it briefly under the broiler if the top is pale.
Yield and serviceOne large cucumber gives five or six pieces. As written this is a garnish for roast meat, three or four pieces a person; four cucumbers serve six as a side.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially a working French kitchen's repertoire set down in English, with the French title kept alongside — here concombres farcis. The filling is a classic duxelles, the finely chopped mushroom-and-onion preparation traditionally associated with the seventeenth-century household of the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook was La Varenne, though the name itself is not documented in La Varenne's own writings; here it is extended with truffle and bound with crumb and yolk in the manner of a forcemeat. Cooked cucumber, unfamiliar as a hot vegetable to many American cooks now, was standard in French service of the period, braised in stock and glazed or stuffed as a garniture; it appears here immediately after glazed cucumbers, in a section given over to tomatoes, corn and garden vegetables. The reliance on numbered cross-references — consommé, gravy, half-glaze — is the clearest sign the book was written for a brigade with those preparations already on hand rather than for a household cook starting from nothing.