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Cucumbers, Bombay
Peel four fresh, ripe, medium cucumbers, cut in four lengthwise strips, remove all spongy parts and wipe them nicely. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a sautoir, add a finely sliced onion and seeded green pepper, fry for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile, and lay the cucumbers over. Season with a light teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon curry powder, pour in one and a half gills cider, boil for five minutes, then set in oven for thirty-five minutes, being careful to baste the cucumbers once in a while. Remove, dress on hot dish, pour entire contents of pan over it, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over all and serve.
A braised cucumber dish in the Anglo-Indian manner, gently curried and finished in the oven. The whole thing hinges on using cucumbers mature enough to hold their shape.
- "Ripe" cucumbersThis means mature, thick-skinned field cucumbers with developed seeds, which is exactly why the recipe tells you to scoop out the spongy centre. A modern slicing cucumber works, but a supermarket English cucumber is too watery and will collapse; peel, quarter, and seed whatever you use.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is about 3/4 cup of cider.
- Which ciderIn American books of this period "cider" usually meant sweet unfermented apple cider; British usage of the same date meant the alcoholic drink. Either works here, but sweet cider gives the softly sweet result the seasoning seems built around.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Use an oven-safe skillet or shallow braiser so the same pan goes from stovetop to oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for a thirty-five-minute braise; the liquid should stay at a bare simmer, not boil away.
- TimingThirty-five minutes reduces the cucumbers to very soft, almost melting strips, which is the intent. If you want them to hold some bite, check at twenty minutes and pull them when a knife meets slight resistance.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon across four cucumbers is a whisper, in line with the restrained curry seasoning of the period. Bloom it in the butter with the onion for the last minute of frying rather than sprinkling it over raw, or it will taste dusty.
- YieldFour cucumbers, sixteen strips, serve four as a vegetable side. The pan liquid is thin by design; spoon it over as directed rather than reducing it to a sauce.
The name points to the Anglo-Indian kitchen rather than to any Indian dish: Bombay was the port through which British India reached British and American tables, and by the turn of the twentieth century "Bombay" on a menu was often little more than a signal that curry powder was involved. Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) gathered many such geographically labelled dishes, and this one is no exception: a braise in the oven, a basting instruction, and a shake of commercial curry powder to justify the title. Cooked cucumber, which reads as odd now, was entirely ordinary then; it appears stewed, stuffed, and fried throughout nineteenth-century cookery, a use generally traced to the fact that garden cucumbers grew large, seedy, and bitter long before anyone bred them for eating raw.