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Fried Cucumbers
Peel two large fresh cucumbers, then cut them crosswise in one-inch pieces, and cut each piece in quarters. Remove the spongy part and seeds, place in one quart cold water with a teaspoon salt and let soak for thirty minutes. Drain and place in a small saucepan with a half ounce butter, two gills water, a teaspoon powdered sugar, two saltspoons salt, a tablespoon vinegar, half a saltspoon cayenne and one white onion cut in quarters. Cover pan and let cook for fifteen minutes. Drain, roll in a frying batter, then drop in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, remove, drain on a cloth, dredge a teaspoon salt over them, dress on a cloth with folded napkin, and serve with one gill hot tomato sauce separately.
A cooked-cucumber dish from the era when cucumbers were as often stewed or fried as eaten raw. The measurements are turn-of-the-century restaurant shorthand, and one of the timings needs cutting hard.
- The frying timeTen minutes in deep fat will scorch the batter long before anything good happens inside. The cucumbers are already cooked through from the braise; the fry is only to set and colour the coating, which takes two to three minutes at 375F.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of water and the tomato sauce at the end is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the salt in the braise half a teaspoon and the cayenne an eighth.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. It is there to gloss the braising liquid rather than to fry anything.
- Choosing cucumbersThe recipe has you quarter the pieces and scrape the spongy centres and seeds out, which suits a large, seedy cucumber. English or seedless cucumbers need less hollowing; ordinary waxed supermarket cucumbers should be peeled deeply.
- The salt soakThirty minutes in a quart of water with a single teaspoon of salt is a very weak brine; it freshens and lightly seasons the flesh rather than drawing much water out of it. Drain the pieces properly before they go in the pan.
- Dry before batteringThe hinge of the dish. Blot the braised pieces thoroughly on paper or a cloth; batter will slide off wet cucumber and spit violently in the fat.
- Frying batterThe recipe calls for 'a frying batter' without giving one. Any plain flour-and-egg or flour-and-beer batter thick enough to coat the back of a spoon will do.
- ServingTwo cucumbers give four modest side portions. The napkin on the platter is there to absorb draining fat, and the tomato sauce goes in a separate boat so the coating stays crisp.
Cucumbers were treated as a cooked vegetable across European kitchens long before the salad bowl claimed them: stewed in butter, stuffed, glazed, or, as here, braised in a sweet-sour liquor and fried in batter. The braise of butter, sugar, vinegar and cayenne is a classic aigre-doux treatment, meant to season a bland, watery vegetable from the inside before it meets the fat. The presentation on a folded napkin with a sauceboat alongside marks the recipe's origin in professional service rather than domestic cooking, which is the character of much of this book. Frying cucumbers has largely fallen out of the general repertoire in Europe and America, though it survives in the American South, where the same idea is applied to green tomatoes and to pickle slices.