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Cooked Cucumbers
To make stewed cucumbers, take four good-sized cucumbers, peel them and cut into halves lengthwise; then quarter them and take out the large seeds with the end of a pointed knife; pour a little lemon juice on each piece; sprinkle with salt and pepper and cover with a slight dusting of flour. Put the pieces of cucumber into a spider and nearly cover them with a good stock. Cover the dish and cook the cucumbers slowly three-quarters of an hour, or until they are tender; lift them carefully out and place on pieces of fried bread cut the size of the vegetable, and put them where they will keep warm. Add to the stock a tablespoonful of browned flour, four spoonfuls of stewed and strained tomatoes, a dash of mace, salt and pepper to taste, and a gill of sherry wine. Pour around the cucumbers and serve at once.
A vegetable side dressed like game — braised in stock, served on fried bread croutes with a sherry and tomato sauce. Most of the work is in the sauce; the cucumbers themselves want watching.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally with three legs for hearth cooking. Any wide, shallow, lidded sauté pan does the same job; you want the pieces in a single layer.
- A gill of sherryHalf a cup. That is a great deal of sherry for four cucumbers, and it goes in at the end without much reduction — add half, taste, and add the rest only if the sauce carries it.
- The 45-minute stewThe cucumbers of the period were likely coarser and thicker-skinned than modern slicing or English cucumbers, which go watery long before three-quarters of an hour. Check at 12 minutes and expect them tender by 20 at most; the goal is translucent and intact, not falling apart.
- Seeds and saltingRemoving the seed core matters more than the recipe lets on — it is where the water lives. Salting the pieces and letting them drain 20 minutes before flouring gives a firmer result and a less dilute sauce.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-coloured, commonly kept ready in a jar in nineteenth-century kitchens. Browning weakens its thickening power appreciably, so the tablespoon suits a thin gravy rather than a thick one. Brown it fresh in a dry skillet over medium heat, stirring, five to eight minutes.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesFour spoonfuls of plain tomato purée or passata, unseasoned. Not tomato paste, which is far more concentrated, and not a seasoned pasta sauce.
- MaceThe lacy outer coat of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. Ground nutmeg is the usual substitute, used in an equal or slightly smaller quantity; a dash means a pinch.
- Fried breadCut crustless bread to the footprint of each cucumber quarter and fry in butter or clarified fat until crisp on both sides. Cut it before you start the sauce — soggy croutes are the failure mode here.
- YieldFour cucumbers, quartered, gives sixteen pieces: a side dish for four, or a light supper course for two or three.
Stewed cucumbers appear in English cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, usually browned in butter and finished with gravy, and were often served with mutton. Cucumber was also treated as a companion to rich meats, on the same logic that pairs them with a sharp fruit jelly — cutting dark meat with something cool and slightly acid. The construction here, with croutes of fried bread beneath and a sherry-spiked brown sauce poured around, follows the Anglo-French service style found in American cookbooks of the period. Browned flour, kept ready-made in a stoppered jar, was a common thickener for such sauces before commercial gravy browning became widespread.