Home › The World's Kitchen › Cucumbers Saute in Cream
Cucumbers Saute in Cream
Peel three medium cucumbers, cut in two lengthwise, remove seeds, spongy parts, and finely slice. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add cucumbers and briskly fry them for five minutes, tossing meanwhile. Mix in small saucepan a tablespoon each butter and flour, mix well, pour in three-quarters gill milk and a gill cream. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add cucumbers, a level teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon, cook for five minutes, dress cucumbers on a hot vegetable dish and serve.
A short, straightforward vegetable dish that depends on two things: keeping the cucumber slices firm and keeping the sauce from breaking. The measurements are Edwardian and need translating before you start.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so three-quarters gill of milk is 6 tablespoons and a gill of cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the cayenne assertive and the nutmeg about right.
- Salt with a lighter handA level teaspoon of salt for three cucumbers and half a cup of cream reads high to modern palates, particularly as the cucumbers are already watery and will concentrate as they cook. Start with half and correct at the end.
- Drain the cucumbers firstAfter slicing, toss with a little salt, leave 15 minutes and pat dry, or the released water will thin the sauce past saving. Adjust the added salt accordingly.
- Fry, do not brownThe five-minute sauté in butter is meant to drive off moisture and set the slices, not colour them. Medium-high heat, constant tossing; browned cucumber turns bitter and limp.
- The sauce is a plain white rouxEqual butter and flour cooked briefly, then milk and cream whisked in off the boil to avoid lumps. "Sharply mix until it comes to a boil" means whisk hard and continuously — the flour needs the boil to lose its raw taste and thicken fully.
- The second five minutesOnce the cucumbers go in, keep it at a bare simmer. A hard boil in a flour-thickened cream sauce will scorch on the bottom and cook the cucumbers to mush; they should stay slightly translucent with some bite.
- Seeds and spongy partsScooping the seed core out with a teaspoon is not fussiness; much of the loose water sits there. Long English cucumbers need less scooping than field cucumbers.
- YieldEnough for four as a side dish. Serve immediately in a warmed dish; the sauce dulls and the cucumbers weep if it stands.
Cooked cucumber, now unfamiliar in English-speaking kitchens, was ordinary through the nineteenth century — stewed, stuffed, fried in batter, or served in a cream or velouté sauce as here. The technique is straightforwardly French: a small white sauce built in a separate pan and married to a vegetable already sweated in butter, the sort of thing a professional kitchen turned out by the dozen as a garnish for veal, lamb or poached fish. Alexander Filippini, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York for decades before compiling his big reference volumes, wrote for households that wanted restaurant food scaled down. Nutmeg with cream and a white vegetable is a pairing generally traced to French practice, and it survives in creamed spinach and gratins long after cucumbers stopped being cooked at all.