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Cucumbers Stuffed with Meat
Cucumbers may be stuffed with a filling of veal, ham or chicken and served for a meat course at a luncheon. Prepare the cucumbers and for the filling have one-third the amount of crumbs that you have chopped meat. Moisten the crumbs with a little hot milk and then stir in the meat and a small piece of butter; add some chopped parsley, salt and pepper, and onion juice if you choose. Mix together with the beaten yolk of an egg. Fill the halves with the prepared meat and tie two together with a fine string and lay them in a baking pan, in which put three cloves, a bay leaf, a slice of carrot and two cupfuls of stock. Cover the pan and bake until the cucumbers are tender. Serve them very hot, with chopped parsley and melted butter poured over them, or make a sauce with the stock, by thickening it with a little flour, add a little lemon juice; strain over the cucumbers and garnish the dish with little pieces of buttered toast.
A tidy way to use up cooked veal, ham or chicken. The original assumes a cook who knows what "prepare the cucumbers" means and who has stock on hand; both need filling in.
- Preparing the cucumbersPeel, halve lengthwise, and scoop out the seed channel with a teaspoon to make a trough. Large, thick cucumbers work best; if the skin is waxed, peeling is not optional.
- The meat is already cookedThe meat is most likely already cooked -- the recipe says only "chopped meat," but veal, ham or chicken chopped fine and given only as long in the oven as the cucumber needs suggests the remains of a roast rather than raw meat.
- Crumb ratioOne-third the volume of the chopped meat in soft fresh breadcrumbs, moistened with just enough hot milk to bind, perhaps 2-3 tablespoons per cup of crumbs. Dry packaged crumbs will drink far more milk and go pasty.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A teaspoon is plenty; it flavours without leaving raw onion texture in the forcemeat.
- TyingUse cotton kitchen twine, two or three ties per pair, and remove it before serving.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither temperature nor time; a covered pan at around 350F for 35 to 45 minutes suits it, depending on the thickness of the cucumbers. They are done when a skewer meets no resistance and the flesh has gone translucent; past that they collapse into water.
- The stock and the sauceTwo cupfuls is a generous braising liquid and will have picked up cucumber water by the end. The original simply thickens it with a little flour and adds lemon juice before straining; reducing it a little first, and working the flour into about an equal weight of butter before whisking it in, is one modern way to avoid lumps.
- YieldReckon one whole stuffed cucumber, meaning two tied halves, per person for a luncheon course, with the toast points as the starch.
Cooked cucumber was ordinary in Anglo-American kitchens well into the twentieth century, stewed, fried in butter or braised in stock like this; the modern assumption that a cucumber is a salad vegetable and nothing else came later. Stuffing a hollowed vegetable with seasoned chopped meat bound by crumbs and egg yolk is standard nineteenth-century economy cookery, a way of turning the remains of a roast into something presentable enough to send to table as its own course. That it belongs to a luncheon rather than dinner is the point: luncheon menus of the period expected lighter, smaller, more decorative dishes, hence the buttered toast garnish and the lemon-sharpened sauce.