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Cucumbers, Espagnole
Neatly peel and cut into even quarters, lengthwise, three medium-sized cucumbers; carefully suppress all the seeds, then cut into half-inch pieces. Plunge into a pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for eight minutes. Drain on a sieve. Heat in a small frying pan a teaspoon oil, adding half finely minced green pepper and half finely minced white onion; gently toss while cooking for two minutes; add half bean finely chopped garlic and two peeled, crushed red tomatoes; mix well and let cook for five minutes, pour in half gill tomato sauce; add the cucumbers. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half teaspoon sugar; lightly mix the whole together and slowly cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Remove, pour into a deep dish, sprinkle half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A cooked cucumber side dish in the Spanish manner — peppers, onion, garlic and tomato. The measurements are pre-standardization but all translate cleanly.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of tomato sauce is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz).
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. That much cayenne makes a genuinely warm dish; scale back if you want the vegetables to lead.
- Half bean of garlic"Bean" here means a clove. Half a clove, finely chopped, is all that is intended — the garlic is background.
- Tomato sauceIn a book of this period this means a plain cooked tomato sauce, not jarred pasta sauce or ketchup. Passata, or canned crushed tomato reduced for a few minutes, is the right substitute.
- Don't overcook the cucumberEight minutes of boiling followed by ten minutes of stewing will leave the pieces limp and watery. Blanch two to three minutes, drain well, and add them to the sauce for the last four or five minutes so they stay translucent but firm.
- Seeding matters"Suppress all the seeds" is the practical instruction: the seed core carries most of the water and will thin the sauce. Scrape it out with a spoon after quartering.
- TomatoesTwo crushed fresh tomatoes, peeled — drop them in boiling water for 20 seconds to slip the skins. Out of season, a scant cup of drained canned tomato does better than a pale fresh one.
- YieldThree cucumbers should give roughly four modest side portions. It is probably better warm than hot.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) works its way through national styles, and "espagnole" in its pages is a label for a treatment rather than a place: green pepper, onion, garlic and tomato, a combination often said to have served nineteenth-century menu French as shorthand for Spanish cooking. It should not be confused with sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce, which has nothing to do with this dish. The cucumber itself is the more surprising element to a modern eye. We treat it almost exclusively as a raw salad vegetable, but cooked cucumber, boiled or stewed or stuffed, was standard in European vegetable cookery well into the twentieth century, and it takes on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with while keeping a slight bite.