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Cucumber Salad (Twelve green cucumbers six)
Twelve green cucumbers, six onions, two green peppers, one tablespoonful of mustard seed, one tablespoonful of celery seed, one-half cupful of salt, one-half cupful of sugar. Pare the cucumbers and remove the seeds. Chop onions, peppers and cucumbers together. Add the salt, let it stand over night in a covered jar; in the morning squeeze out the liquid, then add the other ingredients and cover with cold vinegar.
A little of either of these butters beaten into mayonnaise is a delicious addition; they may also be spread over broiled meats or fish or added to plain white sauce; melted over boiled new potatoes or potato balls.
This is a chopped cucumber relish of the sort once kept in a crock and spooned out beside cold meat, despite being filed as a "salad." It is straightforward, but two things in the printed text need untangling before you start.
- Ignore the last sentenceThe closing lines about "either of these butters" plainly belong to another recipe and appear to have been carried over in the printing. Nothing in this recipe involves butter, mayonnaise or white sauce.
- YieldTwelve cucumbers, six onions and two peppers give roughly 3 to 4 quarts of finished relish. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment.
- Cucumbers"Green cucumbers" means unripe, firm ones rather than a variety, and ripe yellow fruit is not what is wanted here. Use pickling or Kirby cucumbers; the thin-skinned English sort collapses. Peeling and seeding matters here, since the seed cavity is where the water is.
- The salt draw is the hingeHalf a cup of salt on chopped vegetables overnight is a brine draw, not seasoning. Squeeze hard the next morning - most of that salt leaves with the liquid, and any water left behind will dilute the vinegar and slacken the texture. If the drained mixture tastes too salty, rinse once and squeeze again.
- VinegarUse a standard 5 percent cider or white vinegar, enough to cover completely. Period recipes assumed vinegar of unknown strength; modern bottled vinegar is reliable and needs no dilution.
- Mustard and celery seedBoth go in whole and unheated. They soften and give up flavour over several days, so the relish tastes thin on day one and right by day three or four.
- StorageThis is an uncooked, unsealed refrigerator pickle. Keep it covered and cold and use it within a month or so - the text says nothing about processing jars, and it should not be treated as shelf-stable preserve.
- ServingTreat it as a condiment rather than a salad course: alongside cold ham, sausages, beans or fried fish, or stirred into a potato salad.
Chopped cucumber-and-onion relishes under the name "cucumber salad" were a standard way of using up a glut from the kitchen garden, when a dozen cucumbers ripened in a week and there was no way to hold them. The method here - salt overnight, squeeze, cover with cold vinegar - is often said to be among the older forms of pickling in English cookery, predating the boiled, sugar-heavy relishes and "chow chows" that filled canning sections by the 1890s. The stray sentence about compound butters left dangling at the end is a mark of how these turn-of-the-century compendia were assembled: recipes gathered from contributors and periodicals, set in tight columns, and proofread lightly.