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Stuffed Cucumbers
(Turkey and Greece.) Peel and cut off the end of fine large cucumbers, scoop out the seeds, and fill with a mixture of cold boiled rice, chopped chicken or lamb, herbs, and white stock. Cover with 1 cup of white stock or a cup of milk, and stew till tender. Add to the sauce the yolk of an egg, juice of a lemon, some flour and butter, parsley, and a tablespoonful of capers. Strain before adding the latter, pour over and serve hot.
The recipe assumes you know how to build an egg-and-lemon sauce, which is where the dish succeeds or fails. Everything else is straightforward knife work and a gentle simmer.
- The hinge: the egg and lemonBeat the yolk with the lemon juice, then thin it with a few spoonfuls of the hot cooking liquid, whisking constantly, before returning it to the pan. Once the yolk is in, keep the sauce below a simmer; boiling curdles it into threads.
- Choosing cucumbers"Fine large cucumbers" points to thick-walled slicing or field cucumbers rather than thin-skinned English types. The recipe gives no number or size; judge by the capacity of your pan and the amount of filling.
- Hollowing them outCut off one end, then work an apple corer or a long thin spoon down the length to take out the seed core, leaving a shell about half an inch thick. Salt the insides lightly and let them drain ten minutes; cucumbers hold a lot of water that will otherwise dilute the sauce.
- The stuffingRoughly 1 cup cooked rice to 1 cup finely chopped cooked chicken or lamb, moistened with just enough stock to bind. Mint and dill are the herbs this pairing implies in Turkish and Greek cooking; parsley works too. Season it well, since the cucumber brings nothing but water.
- Stewing timePack the shells loosely, stand or lay them in a single layer in a lidded pan, add the cup of stock or milk, and simmer covered 25 to 35 minutes until a knife slides through the flesh without resistance. Overcooked cucumber goes translucent and falls apart when lifted.
- "Some flour and butter"This means beurre manie: butter worked with flour to a paste, about 1 tablespoon each, whisked into the hot liquid before the yolk goes in. Thicken first, then enrich.
- Strain, then capers"Strain before adding the latter" applies to the sauce, not the cucumbers. Pass the sauce to catch any bits of set egg or flour, then stir in the tablespoon of capers and the parsley so they stay whole and visible.
- Milk or stockMilk gives a paler, blander sauce that needs the lemon and capers more; a well-made light chicken stock is the better choice if you have it.
Stuffed vegetables of this kind are the dolma family, from a Turkish verb meaning "to be filled," and the cucumber version sits alongside far commoner stuffings of vine leaves, peppers, tomatoes and courgettes across Turkey, Greece and the Levant. The finishing sauce is essentially avgolemono, the egg-and-lemon liaison that does in eastern Mediterranean cooking what cream does in French, and the recipe carries the note "Turkey and Greece." Brined capers, meanwhile, were long familiar throughout the region.