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Sliced Cucumbers
Peel and slice into very thin, even slices two small, sound, young, cold cucumbers. Place them in a small flat glass dish. Season with three tablespoons dressing. Mix well and serve.
A two-line salad that depends entirely on temperature, thickness and the dressing it does not describe. Everything worth saying is about those three things.
- What "dressing" means hereThe recipe assumes a dressing already made and standing by. In a book of this period an unqualified dressing on a raw vegetable is most likely French dressing: commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, though the proportions vary from book to book. Three tablespoons is enough to coat two small cucumbers without pooling.
- Cold is an instruction, not a descriptionThe cucumbers are to be chilled before slicing, not after. Refrigerate them whole for at least an hour; a cold cucumber slices cleanly and stays crisp once the vinegar hits it.
- ThicknessThe recipe gives no measure; "very thin, even slices" means as thin as you can cut them evenly, thin enough to be translucent. A mandoline or the slicing plate of a food processor does this far more consistently than a knife.
- Salting and drainingThe recipe skips it, but if your cucumbers are watery, toss the slices with a little salt, let them stand 20 minutes, and pat dry before dressing. Otherwise the dressing dilutes within minutes of serving.
- Choosing the cucumber"Small, sound, young" points at a cucumber with undeveloped seeds and no bitterness. Persian or Kirby cucumbers suit best; a large waxed supermarket cucumber should be peeled, halved and seeded.
- The glass dishVinegar left sitting in tin, aluminium or unlined copper can pick up a metallic taste, so a non-reactive dish is a sensible choice for dressed raw vegetables; whether Filippini specified glass for that reason or for looks, the recipe does not say.
- Timing and yieldDress at the table or no more than five minutes before serving; sliced cucumber collapses fast. Two small cucumbers serve two as a side, four alongside a larger salad course.
Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) came out of a career at Delmonico's in New York, and its short entries assume a kitchen where the basic preparations, French dressing among them, are already standing ready; that is why the recipe can say "three tablespoons dressing" and consider the matter closed. Sliced cucumber in oil and vinegar is an old dish, and the cucumber long carried a reputation for being cold and indigestible; English and American writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries insistently paired it with vinegar and pepper, which is often said to have been meant to correct the vegetable's chill. In Filippini's book the dish appears simply as what it is here: a cheap, cooling plate valued for crispness and nothing else.