Cucumber Sauce
Cucumber sauce is a delicious relish for cold meats and broiled fish. Peel and chop two medium-sized cucumbers and let them drain; add a good half teaspoonful of salt and a dash of cayenne pepper to six tablespoonfuls of whipped cream, and mix with the drained cucumber; add a little lemon juice or vinegar, and serve at once. If it is liked, a little onion juice may be added.
A cold cream relish that comes together in minutes, with only one real trick: getting the water out of the cucumber before it meets the cream.
- Draining is the hingeChopped cucumber is mostly water, and any that remains will thin the whipped cream into a soupy dressing within minutes. Salt the chopped flesh lightly, let it sit in a sieve 20-30 minutes, then press or wring it in a clean towel before mixing. The original's half teaspoon of salt can do double duty here, though you should taste before adding more.
- Seeds and skinCucumbers of the period were generally thicker-skinned than modern varieties and had larger, watery seed cavities, which may be why the recipe calls for peeling. Scooping the seeds out as well is worth doing. A modern English or Persian cucumber needs no peeling and gives a firmer result.
- Six tablespoonfuls of whipped creamThis most likely means six tablespoons measured after whipping, which would be roughly three tablespoons of heavy cream before beating; the phrasing is ambiguous. Whip to soft peaks only; stiffly beaten cream will break when you fold in the acid and the wet cucumber.
- Onion juiceOnion juice was got by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through cloth, so as to have the flavour without pieces. Half a teaspoon is plenty. Grating an onion on a microplane and using the liquid that pools gives the same effect.
- Cayenne"A dash" here means a pinch, no more than an eighth of a teaspoon. The heat is meant to register faintly behind the cream, not to be tasted as pepper.
- Serve at once means itThere is no stabiliser in this sauce, which is presumably why the original insists on serving immediately; it will begin to loosen and weep fairly quickly. Mix it after the fish comes off the grill, not before.
- YieldTwo cucumbers and roughly three tablespoons of cream should give somewhere around a cup and a half of sauce; the original gives no yield or serving count.
- Substitution worth knowingThick sour cream, crème fraîche or drained yogurt in place of the whipped cream gives a sauce that keeps a day in the refrigerator, at the cost of the light texture the original is after.
Cucumber and cream served cold beside fish or cold roast is an old northern European pairing, and versions of it turn up across nineteenth-century English and American cookery under names like cucumber salad, cucumber dressing and, as here, cucumber sauce; the Scandinavian and German habit of dressing sliced cucumber with sour cream and vinegar is often connected to the same tradition.