This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
“One Hundred Things to Do with a Cucumber” may attract the wrong sort of reader. But the title could boost sales, should anyone ever think of publishing my collected columns.
Alan Coren, finding that bestselling subjects in bookshops included golf, cats and Hitler, called his collection Golfing for Cats and stuck a bold swastika on the wrappers. His reputation was unimpaired.
The peril in my prospective title is not that I shall be misjudged as kinky (though a friend who googled “cucumbers” in search of recipes got some strange correspondence in consequence).
The real danger is that readers will dismiss cucurbitaceae, outside the realms of erotica, as unexciting — I daren’t call them “boring”. Cucumbers may be fun in the sadist’s cave, but seem dull in the dining room. Are there even as many as a hundred things to do with them?
Frans de Waal, the great, recently dead primatologist, was typically underappreciative. He is famous for an experiment in what he called “fairness”. Two capuchin monkeys in adjacent cages were happy when fed with cucumbers, but when one of them was given a grape, the cucumber recipient rattled his cage with all the outraged egalitarianism of an inmate of the Bourbon Bastille.
He spat his portion out and threw it at his keeper. The professor professed no surprise. “To me,” he said, “cucumbers just taste like water.” Monkey and man were of one mind.
But although cucumbers do contain a lot of water and not much else, and although they lack the sugar, starch and fat that we primates crave, they deserve, if wisely prepared, dressed and served, a more positive appraisal.
Part of their neglect arises from the fact that so few varieties are readily available in shops. In the US, where I live and work, we get short, stubby, bulbous native cucumbers, stuffed with big seeds.
They’re not much good, except for sandwiching and pickling, but are more robust than the attenuated, elongated objects that preponderate in Europe, or the thin, feeble, dangling types they sell on sticks in Japanese streets. America’s National Gardening Association lists 689 varieties: most resemble one another so closely as makes little difference.
Shoppers, however, who acquire lemon cucumbers or a white variety can widen, in self-congratulation, their sense of how to enliven a dish of crudités.
Those of us who have to make do with common varieties — now ripening nicely in England — must let imagination take the place of diversity. Cooking enhances cucumbers. Halved, blanched and buttered or coated with cream, they can garnish any well-seasoned fish or meat; or, scattered with diced, dense, red vegetables such as peppers, beetroot or carrots, they supply contrasting colours and textures, with complementary flavours. I like them stuffed with crabmeat or crispy bacon, especially if gratinéed under breadcrumbs and parmesan.
Summer, however, calls for cold cucumbers. If one asks for new ways to prepare them — as for any food that seems to lack potency or punch, or, indeed, in the face of almost any culinary question — the answer is alcohol.
The barman who discovered that a slice of cucumber is better in a dry martini than an olive or a pickled onion or a bit of lemon disclosed previously undetected chemistry: cucumbers and gin intensify each other’s flavour.
A very dry martini dressing therefore transforms cucumber salad: a squeeze of lemon and a garnish of chopped olives helps stimulate barstool memories. Vodka can help the rind, which is the most flavoursome part of the cucumber with a slightly acrid kick.
Stripped in linguini-like threads, rinds combine well with fat prawns or flakes of salmon and crunchy chopped celery. They need a dollop of mayonnaise, blended with a splash of spicy bloody mary, which can be thickened, if necessary, with the pulped flesh of a tomato: even drinkers who don’t like their bloody marys sweet should put a spoonful of sweet sherry in the mixture.
What can one do with the flesh of the peeled cucumbers? Generously diced and dressed with chilli oil and white wine vinegar, it will accompany smoked oysters or mussels as perfectly as well balanced Galenic humours. Pickling, perhaps? Most pickled cucumbers are pickled to death.
A superior alternative to gherkins and cornichons is sliced cucumber, marinaded in gin and white vinegar with plenty of peppercorns, and sprinkled with diced spring onions, parsley and a tiny pinch of cayenne before serving.
I need only about 90 more recipes for my projected book. When I think of them, I’ll celebrate with gin-laced, juiced cucumber.
