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Cucumbers, Romaine
Peel two good-sized sound cucumbers, cut in halves, remove spongy parts, finely slice, place in a quart cold water with a teaspoon salt for thirty minutes and drain thoroughly on a sieve. Lightly butter a baking dish, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese and arrange a layer of half the quantity of cucumbers over, season with three saltspoons each salt and pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and dredge a tablespoon Parmesan cheese over all. Divide a half ounce butter in very little bits on top, place balance cucumbers in layer on top, season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon pepper. Sprinkle a light tablespoon Parmesan cheese, arrange again a few bits of butter on top of all, pour one and a half gills tomato sauce all around, set to bake in oven for forty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A cooked cucumber gratin, which reads oddly now but was standard practice when cucumbers were treated as a vegetable rather than a salad. The measurements are pre-standardization and the oven temperature is missing entirely.
- "Romaine" is not lettuceThe title means Roman-style, in the manner of à la romaine — here signaling the cheese, nutmeg and tomato. No romaine lettuce is involved anywhere in the dish.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato sauce is three-quarters of a cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The salt adds upThree saltspoons of salt in the lower layer plus two in the upper comes to roughly one and a quarter teaspoons of added salt, on top of a half-hour soak in salted water and two kinds of salty cheese. Season the layers lightly and correct at the end instead.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits forty-five minutes in a shallow dish; the aim is soft cucumber and a browned cheese top, not a hard crust.
- Do not skip the drainThis is the hinge. Cucumbers are mostly water, and the salted soak plus a thorough drain on a sieve is what keeps the finished dish from flooding with liquid. Press gently in a towel before layering.
- Dish and depthThe recipe says only "baking dish"; a shallow gratin dish rather than a deep casserole suits it. Two cucumbers in two layers are best kept shallow, or the middle steams rather than bakes.
- Tomato saucePoured "all around" means around the edges, so the top stays exposed and browns. A plain reduced tomato sauce works; a heavily seasoned jarred pasta sauce will overwhelm the nutmeg.
- YieldFour modest side servings. It is best eaten hot, as it slackens and weeps as it cools.
Cooked cucumber was ordinary in European and American kitchens well into the twentieth century — stewed, stuffed, fried in batter or gratinated like this — and what has changed since is the relative decline of such cooked preparations. Labels of this kind were applied loosely in professional cookery of the period, part of a whole vocabulary of national tags (à la milanaise, à la portugaise) that told a cook what garnish to reach for — Parmesan in the one case, tomato in the other — rather than describing any dish actually eaten in Rome or Milan. The International Cook Book belongs to that hotel-kitchen tradition, where a vegetable was expected to arrive at the table dressed and named, and where the Parmesan-or-Swiss substitution written into the recipe shows how much these formulas depended on what the larder happened to hold.