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Fried Cucumbers (May be fried also in butter)
Cucumbers may be fried also in butter. Cut the cucumbers crosswise in half-inch slices and lay them in ice water. make a batter of one cupful of milk, one beaten egg, a saltspoonful of salt, a little pepper, one and one-half cupfuls of sifted flour; stir until it is smooth and free from lumps. Drop the pieces of cucumber in this batter and see that they are well covered, before dropping a few at a time, into hot lard. Cook until a golden brown. Then take them out with a wire spoon and drain on brown paper in a hot oven until all are cooked.
A straightforward batter-fry, but the cucumbers of 1900 were larger, seedier and more watery than most sold today. Two details carry the dish: getting the water out of the slices and keeping the fat hot enough.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. With a cup of milk and a cup and a half of flour, the batter wants at least half a teaspoon of salt by modern palates.
- Dry the slicesThe ice-water soak firms the flesh, but batter will not cling to a wet cucumber and the water turns to steam in the fat. Lift the slices out and blot them thoroughly on a towel before they go into the batter.
- Which cucumbersPeriod cucumbers were often mature and thick-skinned. If yours are, peel them and scrape out the seed core; slicing cucumbers or Kirbys can go in skin and all.
- Fat temperature"Hot lard" was judged by eye; modern practice for battered vegetables is about 365-375F. Below that the batter absorbs fat and goes limp; above 400F the outside browns before the cucumber softens. Fry a few at a time so the temperature does not crash.
- Butter, if you use itThe headnote's butter version most likely means shallow-frying in a skillet rather than deep-frying. Butter alone will brown and burn at frying heat, so use clarified butter or cut it with a neutral oil.
- DrainingBrown paper was grocer's wrapping. A wire rack set over a sheet pan does the job better, as paper of any kind traps steam under the crust.
- Holding in a hot ovenKeep the oven at 200-250F, no higher. The instruction is only to hold the cooked batches while the rest fry.
- YieldTwo medium cucumbers make roughly four side servings, and the batter quantity given is generous for that. Serve immediately with salt and lemon.
Fried cucumber turns up repeatedly in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the cucumber was widely regarded as indigestible when raw, and cooking it was as much a matter of received wisdom about the stomach as of taste. The batter-and-lard treatment here is the same one applied in these books to oysters, parsnips, salsify and green tomatoes, an all-purpose method for turning a watery vegetable into something crisp and substantial. The reference to lard rather than oil is simply the economics of the period kitchen, where rendered pork fat was the cheap frying medium and vegetable shortening was only beginning to appear.