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Cucumbers with Cream Sauce
A favorite English dish is stewed cucumbers with a cream sauce. Peel the cucumbers and lay them in ice water for an hour, then cut them into half-inch slices and put in a saucepan of boiling water and let them simmer twenty minutes. Drain off the water aud turn over the cucumbers half a cupful of boiling water, one tablespoonful of butter, and salt and pepper; cover and let them steam a few minutes over the back of the fire while the sauce is being prepared. Melt one tablespoonful of butter in a small pan and stir into it a spoonful of flour, gradually stir in one cupful of cream or rich milk; season with salt and a little cayenne pepper and flavor with lemon juice. Turn the cucumbers into a heated dish in which have been placed little squares of buttered toast and pour the sauce over the whole. Serve immediately.
A plain white sauce over stewed cucumber, meant as a hot vegetable dish rather than a salad. The only real decisions are how long to cook the cucumber and when to add the lemon.
- Cut the simmering timeTwenty minutes in boiling water leaves half-inch slices watery and collapsing. Five to seven minutes is enough to take them past raw while they still hold their shape; test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- "The back of the fire"On a coal range this was the coolest zone, used for holding. Use the lowest gas setting, or set the covered pan off the heat entirely while you make the sauce.
- "A spoonful of flour"Read this as one tablespoon, matching the tablespoon of butter. That gives a thin pouring sauce with a cup of cream; use two tablespoons of each if you want it to coat.
- Lemon juice last, off the heatAcid stirred into hot dairy can curdle it, though the flour in this sauce gives some protection. Safest to finish the sauce, pull it from the burner, then stir in the juice a few drops at a time and taste as you go.
- Choose the cucumberThe English forcing cucumbers of the period were long, thin-skinned and mild. English or Persian cucumbers behave the same way; with standard field cucumbers, peel and scoop out the seed core, which is where most of the water sits.
- The ice-water hourOptional by modern standards, though it does firm the flesh. If you skip it, salt the slices lightly for fifteen minutes and blot them dry instead, which draws out more liquid than soaking does.
- ToastCut the toast into squares and butter it just before serving. Laid in the dish ahead of time it turns to paste under the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no cucumber quantity; two medium cucumbers with the cupful of cream should serve about four as a side dish.
Stewed cucumber was a standard English vegetable through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the plant was grown under glass in gentry gardens and treated as something to be cooked rather than eaten raw — Hannah Glasse and her successors give fried and stewed cucumber long before anyone thought of a cucumber sandwich. The lemon juice at the end does the work that vinegar does in older versions of the dish, and the cream-and-flour sauce is the plain white sauce found throughout American cookbooks of the era.