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Another Cucumber Sauce
Peel and chop the cucumbers and drain them in a colander. To one pint of pulp, add a generous half cupful of vinegar, half teaspoonful of white pepper, a speck of cayenne, one and one-half teaspoonfuls of salt and three tablespoonfuls of onions, chopped very fine. This sauce will keep some time if put in a cold place. It is exceedingly nice to sprinkle over chopped cabbage.
An uncooked cucumber relish, closer to a fresh salsa than a sauce, meant to be spooned cold over roast game birds or venison. The whole thing takes ten minutes and lives or dies on how thoroughly you drain the cucumber.
- Drain harder than you thinkChopped cucumber is mostly water, and if it goes into the vinegar wet the sauce turns thin and bland within an hour. A colander alone is not much; toss the chopped flesh with a little of the salt, let it sit 20-30 minutes, then press it in a sieve or twist it in a towel before measuring your pint of pulp.
- A pint of pulpThat is 2 cups of packed drained cucumber, which takes roughly 3 large or 4 medium cucumbers to start with. Modern seedless English cucumbers give less waste; if using field cucumbers, seed them, since the seed jelly is the wettest part.
- "A generous half cupful"Call it a little over 4 fl oz. Vinegars of the period were not standardised and may have been weaker and rounder than today's 5% distilled white, so start with a scant half cup of distilled and taste up. The recipe does not say which vinegar; cider vinegar is a reasonable choice.
- A speck of cayenneA term that turns up regularly in period cookbooks for less than a pinch; modern equivalents usually put it around 1/16 teaspoon. It is there for warmth behind the white pepper, not heat you can identify.
- White pepper is deliberateWhite pepper -- Half a teaspoon of black pepper would work as seasoning but would fleck a pale sauce, which may be why white is specified. Grind it fresh if you can.
- OnionThree tablespoons finely chopped is about half a small onion. A mild sweet or spring onion suits raw cucumber better than a strong yellow keeper, and rinsing the chopped onion in cold water takes off the sulphurous edge.
- "A cold place" means the refrigeratorThe vinegar and salt do preserve it somewhat, but this is a fresh relish with nothing sterilised and no processing. Keep it covered and cold and use it inside three or four days; do not treat the line about keeping as permission to jar it for the shelf.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 1/2 cups. The only serving suggestion the recipe gives is its own: spooned over shredded raw cabbage, which effectively makes it a dressing and is worth taking seriously.
Cool, sharp, watery accompaniments were a common nineteenth-century answer to rich, dark, sometimes high-flavoured meat, in the same way that cucumber is still served with salmon and mint with lamb. Older English cookery served cucumbers dressed with vinegar and pepper as a matter of course, partly on the long-standing and now discarded belief that raw cucumber was hard to digest and needed acid and spice to correct it. What distinguishes this version from the cooked, cream-thickened cucumber sauces of the same era is that nothing is heated at all, which puts it in the same family as the uncooked chow-chows and cold relishes common in American cookbooks around 1900. The closing note about cabbage is a small piece of household economy of the kind these books are full of: one preparation, two uses, nothing wasted.