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Cucumber Saute
Peel three sound cucumbers, cut them in half lengthwise, remove the spongy part, then cut them in quarter-inch slices, plunge in boiling water for five minutes, drain on a sieve. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add the cucumbers, season with light teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, then fry on a brisk fire for eight minutes, frequently tossing them meanwhile. Dress on a dish, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A short French-style vegetable saute that depends almost entirely on getting the cucumbers dry before they hit the pan.
- Dry them properlyDraining on a sieve is the minimum; after blanching, spread the slices on a towel and blot. Wet cucumber steams in the butter and collapses into a watery heap instead of browning.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is conventionally a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for three cucumbers. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter to a half teaspoon may suit better.
- "Brisk fire"Medium-high to high heat on a modern burner. The pan needs to be hot enough that the slices color rather than sweat, which is also why the tossing matters.
- Which cucumbersThe recipe assumes thick-skinned field cucumbers with a developed seed core, hence the peeling and the removal of the "spongy part." English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling and little or no seeding; blanch briefly and dry them well.
- Eight minutes is a maximumBlanched slices are already most of the way cooked. Check at four or five minutes and pull them while they still have some bite; past that they turn to translucent mush.
- The butterA tablespoon in a wide pan is thin coverage. Use a pan just large enough to hold the slices in a near-single layer, or work in two batches, or the butter will scorch before the cucumbers take on any color.
- YieldThree cucumbers should serve about four as a side dish, though the recipe gives no yield. Best served immediately; it does not hold or reheat.
Cooked cucumber is far older and far more common in European kitchens than its modern reputation as a strictly raw salad vegetable suggests. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and French cookbooks stew, stuff, fry and puree cucumbers routinely, sometimes with a preliminary blanching of the kind seen here. The method in this recipe is a plain saute au beurre finished with chopped parsley, a treatment often given to blanched vegetables in a professional kitchen of the period. The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its vegetable chapters read like a working restaurant's repertoire set down in shorthand for domestic cooks, terse on technique and free with terms such as "brisk fire" and "saltspoon" that a trained hand would not have needed explained.