Cucumber

Description Varieties Recipes

Cherished universally for its moisture and cool brisk taste, the cucumber in its wild state still may be found in the southern approaches to the Himalayas. It was domesticated in Asia and its cultivation spread westward and southward in the early classical period. Known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, the cucumber familiar to Theaphrastus and Pliny differed from modern forms in having a rougher, pebbled rind and a more irregular configuration. Columbus brought the vegetables with him to the New World and planted it in Haiti in 1494. The vegetable was so familiar to the early explorers that Cartier, DeSoto, and the 16th-century English adventurer Arthur Barlow believed that Native squashes they encountered in Indian gardens were cucumbers. Authentic cucumbers grew in the gardens of Jamestown and Plymouth.

By the time settlers planted New World gardens, European gardeners had developed several distinct varieties of the vegetable that gathered unto them a bewildering multitude of names. The standard cucumber for pickling (Cucumis satevus vulgaris), middling in length, green complected and moderately rough skinned would become identified as the “Early Cluster” by 19th-century American seedsmen. A longer, rougher cucumber with more point to the ends was familiar to American gardeners as the Long Green Prickly Cucumber or the Early Frame. The smooth skinned, seven/eight inch rounded cucumber popular for salad slicing in the 19th century bore the name, “Long Green Turkey” cucumber. The very long, narrow seedless variety became known as the Long Green English Cucumber. The ovoid, white cucumbers cultivated for the cosmetic trade were known either as the Bonneiul or the Dutch White. During the 19th-century several sorts of Russian-bred cucumbers that had the rounded configuration of melons became fashionable among experimental gardeners. Gardeners and plant brokers during the 19th century elaborated each of these varieties, developing dwarf versions, or cultivars that came to market earlier, or were more amenable to forcing in hot houses. One of the most popular of these market creations was the West Indian gherkin, a refraction of the first of the varieties above, that would become the smallest cucumber widely grown, used exclusively for pickles.

Cucumbers grew in most kitchen gardens in the United States and became an important item in the hot houses of market gardeners. Several maxims governed their growth: enrich the soil to enrich the crop; don’t overcrowd—one cucumber planter per hill; don’t plant near melons, pumpkins, or squashes if you are producing seed; raise the vines and fruits off the ground for larger crop and healthier growth (piles of brushwood were a favorite mode of elevation); “When the plants have got two rough leaves out, they will begin to make a shoot in the middle. Pinch that shoot off.” It will make the plant fruit weeks earlier.[4]

The editor of the Southern Planter in 1854 wrote, “Who ever heard of cooking a cucumber? We hear our readers exclaim! Try it; and then tell your neighbors how well a poor man may live in this country.” The comment encapsulates the great debate of the period—are cucumbers best eaten raw and pickled, or boiled and fried? The tradition—brought by settlers from Europe during the colonial era was to feast on uncooked cucumbers. During the eighteenth century, physicians contemplating the nature of human digestion started viewing cooking as an externalized form of digestive process, something that greatly aided the efficient uptake of the body of the nutritional elements of food. Uncooked fruits and vegetables did not get fully utilized by the body, and indeed, troubled the stomach and intestines by reason of a resistance to full incorporation. They prompted dyspepsia, a gastrointestinal disorder that prompted gas, stomach aches, blockage, and every other sort of internal distress. By the second decade of the nineteenth century the linkage between raw fruits and vegetables and dyspepsia had become so ingrained in Anglo-America that it became old wives lore. Witness the following comic satire on the dyspepsia scare published in 1831: “Who ever heard of farmer’s children with their pockets full of green apples, and their hands full of cucumbers ever having the dyspepsia? But we are creatures of habit after all, and there are certain old women in large towns who have made it their business for years, at this particular season to call upon their neighbors for the sole purpose of cautioning them against allowing their children to eat cucumbers, ‘for they are despised bad things,’ for which advice they expect a cup of tea; then follows on a set of doctors, half old women and half quack, who will tell that ‘cucumbers are of a clogging nature, that they stop of the bilatory ducts, and produce cholera morbus.” The author counsels that the scare mongers be ignored, and that “if parents would furnish their children with more fruit during warm weather, it would be much more for their health.” The writer was the prophet of twentieth century treatments of the cucumber, which reverted to the original emphasis on the raw fruit or the pickled condiment. Yet in his day, he could not counter the immense influence of the English physician, Dr. William Kitchiner, who wrote a cookbook, The Cook’s Oracle (1821), that gave the stewed cucumber the imprimatur of health as well as fashionability. The mid-19th century became the heyday of the cooked cucumber, with housekeepers and chefs in every region experimenting with methods to render the vegetable palatable and avoid the pitfalls inherent with its moist texture. Cookbook writers offered encouragement to their readers by assuring them the cook vegetable was indistinguishable from eggplant (which was never eaten raw and only infrequently pickled). At the same time the global stretch of American commerce made the world of spices available to many cooks in the United States, permitting them to enrich the range of flavors in pickles. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century experimentation began on the cold cucumber soups that have refreshed the summer table for much of the twentieth century.

1. E. Lewis Sturtevant, “History of Garden Vegetables—Cucumber,” American Naturalist 21 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1887), pp. 906-910.
2. “Early Cucumbers,” New England Farmer 6, 33 (February 22, 1828).
3. Worcester Yeoman, New England Farmer 4, 44 (May 16, 1826), p. 347.
4. William Cobbett, The American Gardener (London: C. Clement, 1821), art. 217.
5. Southern Planter 7, 11 (November 1847), 339.
6. Genesee Farmer 1, 31 (August 8, 1831), p. 242.