Cucumber Soup
(Greece.) Peel 4 large cucumbers, slice them, and remove the seeds. Fry with 1 ounce butter, add salt, pepper, a blade of mace, 1 pint hot milk, and 1 quart white stock. Cook 1 1/2 hours. Thicken with flour and butter and press through a sieve.
A simple purée soup built on the old pattern: sweat, simmer long, thicken with a butter-and-flour paste, then sieve. Two things need adjusting for a modern cook — the cooking time and the thickening method.
- Cook far less than 90 minutesCucumber's flavour fades badly with very long cooking and can go flat and faintly bitter. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at a bare simmer is enough to soften the flesh for sieving; the long time here reflects a period taste for thoroughly cooked vegetables.
- White stockA pale unroasted stock of veal or chicken bones with onion and no browning. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily herbed, which will overwhelm the cucumber.
- A blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril that sheathes the nutmeg, about the size of a fingernail. Remove it before sieving. Roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, or a light grating of nutmeg, if blades are not to hand.
- Fry with butterThis means sweating, not colouring. Keep the heat low and the pan covered so the cucumber softens and gives up water without browning — colour in the pan means a grey-beige soup rather than a pale green one.
- Thicken with flour and butterEqual weights kneaded to a paste (beurre manié) and whisked into the simmering soup in small pieces. About 1 oz of each will lightly thicken this quantity. Simmer two or three minutes afterwards to cook out the raw flour.
- Pressing through a sieveA blender does the work faster; pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the original intends. Cucumber skin and seeds are already removed, so there is little fibre to catch.
- Seasoning at the endMilk-based purées dull as they cool. Taste after sieving and correct the salt, and a squeeze of lemon lifts the whole thing, though the original does not call for it.
- YieldA pint of milk and a quart of stock give roughly six servings as a first course.
Cucumber soup sits slightly oddly under the label "Greece" — cucumber in Greek cooking is far more often eaten raw, in salad or beaten into yoghurt with garlic, than simmered in milk. What the recipe actually describes is the standard Anglo-French purée of the period: sweat the vegetable in butter, simmer in white stock, bind with beurre manié, pass through a tammy or sieve. That gap between the national label and the formula beneath it is worth remembering when reading any collection organised by country. The technique itself is sound and very old.