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The Emperor Tiberius’s Moveable
Garden, Sparta’s Beastly Broth,
Cleopatra’s Beauty Secret, New
York’s Electric Pickle, and
A Burmese Cucumber King
A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The lot of the parent of teenagers is often not a happy one. Virginia planter Landon Carter of Sabine Hill records in his diary on July 24, 1766, that he’s worried about his daughter Judy. “She does bear ungovernable the whole summer through,” he writes, “eating extravagantly and late at night of cucumbers and all sorts of bilious trash.” Teenagers: they’re moody; they keep awful hours; they eat junk food; and they form foolish attachments. The cucumber-gorging Judy eventually eloped, to her father’s fury, with her cousin Reuben — though presumably he eventually forgave her, since in his will he left her 800 pounds sterling and a gold watch.
Judy Carter’s cucumber, Cucumis sativus, comes to us by way of India, where it has been cultivated for at least three thousand years — and perhaps considerably longer, since excavations in 1970 at Spirit Cave on the Burma-Thailand border dredged up seeds of cucumbers, peas, beans, and water chestnuts, remains of meals eaten, according to radiocarbon dating, in 9750 BCE. The wild ancestor of our present-day edible cucumber has never been definitively identified, but one guess is C. hardwickii, an unappetizing native of the Himalayas, small and bitter, scattered with nasty little spines. It may have been C. hardwickii that the unfortunate Enkidu ate along with worms, figs, and caper buds in the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh.
Time and human effort, however, eventually created a sweeter and less off-putting vegetable, and the result quickly spread. The ancient Egyptians supposedly ate them at every meal, dipped in bowls of brine, and used them to make a questionable drink called cucumber water. To do this, a hole was cut in a ripe cucumber, the inside stirred up with a small stick, the hole plugged, and the cucumber then buried in the ground for several days. When unearthed, boasts an ancient recipe, “the pulp will be found converted into an agreeable liquid,” possibly the concoction the Israelites mourned as they slogged thirstily through the desert after Moses.
Nonetheless, not everybody liked cucumbers, and some thought them downright dangerous. Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault’s L’Agriculture et Maison Rustique, translated in 1616 into English as The Country Farm, warns starkly that “The use of Cucumbers is altogether hurtfull,” and contemporary medical authorities cautioned that cucumbers filled the body with “cold noughtie humors” and brought on ague. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary on August 22, 1663: “This day Sir W. Batten tells me that Mr. Newhouse is dead of eating cowcumbers, of which the other day I heard of another, I think, Sir Nicholas Crisp’s son.”
If not fatal, they were nondescript. A quote from the biblical Apocrypha states, “A scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keeps nothing,” which certainly implies that the cucumber was not the top crop on the Middle Eastern block. Nutritionally, that “nothing” is literal. The average cucumber — like the average jellyfish — is 96 percent water, and contains little else other than a smidgen of vitamins A and C (1 percent and 2 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance, respectively), all in the peel. At that rate, in terms of vitamin A, it takes 120 unpeeled cucumbers to equal one carrot. Food historian Waverley Root describes the cucumber as “as close to neutrality as a vegetable can get without ceasing to exist.”
Still, all that water gave the characteristically cool cucumber a banner reputation as a refreshing thirst-quencher. Early caravans took them along as a sort of vegetable water bottle; overheated Greeks mashed them and mixed the pulp with honey and snow to make an ancient version of sherbet. The Romans were enthusiastic about them, occasionally eaten raw but more often boiled and served with oil, vinegar, and honey. The emperor Tiberius was mad for them, consuming, according to Pliny the Elder, ten a day, every day. To indulge his autocratic whims, Roman gardeners began growing cucumbers in earth-filled carts, which they trundled about from spot to spot to make the most of the sun. In the off-season, they grew them in cucumber frames, of the sort Peter Rabbit fell into so disastrously in Mr. McGregor’s garden, glazed with transparent sheets of specularia, which was probably mica.
Cucumber cultivation dwindled with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and only reappeared in force in the sixteenth century, a period of deprivation that chef and food writer Bert Greene refers to as the “cucumber black-out.” Still, in the late eighth century, Pepin (the Wise) of France, possibly influenced by a classical belief that steeping seeds in cucumber juice protected them from insect predation, ordered rows of cucumbers planted around his vineyards to keep boll weevils, borers, and cutworms away from the valuable grapes; and Pepin’s renowned son, Charlemagne, ordered them planted in the royal gardens. He even declared them his favorite fruit, and — though cucumbers are found on his plant list under “Salads” — he reportedly ate them for dessert, in custard tarts.
The Cucumber King
In the tenth century CE, a farmer became king of Burma because of a cucumber. The story goes that King Theinhko, after a recreational day galloping through the forest, was hungry, and so paused to pick and eat a cucumber from a farmer’s field. The furious farmer killed him with a spade. The king’s attendant then told the farmer — possibly making up the rule on the spot — that whoever killed a king then became a king in his stead.
The farmer was unwilling to leave his cucumbers, but was eventually persuaded by offers of gold, silver, elephants, and a new wardrobe. When he arrived at the palace, the queen — “fearing lest the country and villages be cast into turmoil” — accepted the situation, provided the farmer had a bath. He ruled Burma for 33 years as King Nyaung-u Sawrahan, popularly known as the Cucumber King.
Cucumbers were being grown in England in the fourteenth century, but only became truly popular, the story goes, during the reign of Henry VIII, under the auspices of the first of his six queens, Catherine of Aragon, who liked them sliced in her Spanish salads. They lasted better than Henry’s wives, and by the reign of Elizabeth I, according to John Gerard’s Great Herball (1597), English gardens boasted five varieties: the Common, the Turkey, the Adder, the Pear Fashion, and a mysterious “rare & beautiful cucumber” from Spain, a foot in length and streaked and spotted in “divers colours.” John Parkinson, in his horticultural manual Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), mentioned seven varieties, including one that “bareth but small fruit (used in pickles)” and another the size and shape of a lemon.
The medicinal cucumber dates to ancient times. Surprisingly, despite its phallic shape and size, the cucumber is one of the few vegetables in the Greek pharmacopoeia that is not an aphrodisiac. Sixteenth-century German herbalist Leonhart Fuchs quotes the Greek proverb “Let a woman weaving a cloak eat a cucumber,” adding that “female weavers, if we believe Aristotle, are unchaste and eager for lovemaking. So to restrain and weaken their urge, the adage advises women weavers to eat cucumbers.”
Sleeping on a bed of cucumbers was said to alleviate fever — hence the saying “cool as a cucumber”; cucumber leaves stamped in wine were said to be effective for treating dog bites; and women wishing for children were encouraged to wear a cucumber suggestively suspended from the waist. To dream of cucumbers was believed to indicate the imminence of falling in love. The Romans claimed that cucumbers scared away mice, and John Gerard claimed that cucumbers, eaten three times a day in oatmeal pottage, could cure swellings of the face, noses “red as roses,” pimples, “pumples,” and like disasters of the seventeenth-century complexion.
The horticultural cucumber was subject to an equal array of arcane beliefs. Cucumbers were said to be frightened of thunderstorms, so one expert gardener advised draping the plants in comforting “thin Coverlets” in the event of violently inclement weather. Estienne and Liébault, of the “hurtfull” cucumbers, claimed that cucumber seed more than three years old would yield (presumably nonhurtful) radishes when planted; but since they also suggested crushing flat parsley with a garden roller to make it curly, their advice should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.
A number of growers who should have known better claimed that cucumbers waxed and waned along with the moon. It was customary to pick cucumbers at the full of the moon, in hopes of getting the very biggest, which were also considered the very best. Garden designer Batty Langley objected to this practice in his New Principles of Gardening (1728):
“‘Tis a very great Custom amongst a great many People to make choice of the very largest Cucumbers, believing them to be the best, which are not, but instead thereof, are the very worst, except such as are quite yellow. Therefore in the Choice of Cucumbers, I recommend those that are about three Parts grown, or hardly so much, before those very large ones, whose Seed are generally large, and not fit to be eaten, excepting by such Persons whose stomachs are very hot.”
The vitriolic Dr. Samuel Johnson objected to all cucumbers, of whatever size, saying “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” It’s possible that he may have changed his mind given a chance at cucumbers prepared à la Elizabeth Rafald, who in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) recommended that large-sized cucumbers be stuffed with partly cooked pigeons, cleaned, but with heads and feathers left on, so that the heads appeared attached to the cucumber. These were cooked in broth and served garnished with barberries.
General Ulysses S. Grant, who had simpler tastes, loved cucumbers, and often made an entire meal on sliced cucumbers and a cup of coffee. Eliza Leslie includes two cucumber recipes in her Directions for Cookery (1840), one for raw cucumbers in vinegar and oil, and one for cucumbers sliced, sprinkled in flour, and fried in butter, which she recommends as a breakfast dish.
Cucumbers journeyed to the Western Hemisphere with Columbus, who planted them in his experimental garden on Haiti in 1494. They seem to have done well. By 1535, Jacques Cartier observed “very great cucumbers” in Canada near Montreal, and Hernando de Soto found “cucumbers better than those of Spain” in Florida in 1539. The colonists planted them, and by 1806 seedsman Bernard M’Mahon, author of the comprehensive Gardener’s Calendar, listed eight standard varieties in American gardens, including the impressive Long Green Turkey, twenty inches long at maturity.
Also grown in American gardens, according to M’Mahon, was the West Indian gherkin, Cucumis anguria, nicknamed the Jerusalem pickle. C. anguria was described in an eighteenth-century natural history of Jamaica as a walnut-sized pale green fruit, “far inferior” to the garden cucumber, but edible if soaked in vinegar. This fazed the American colonists not at all since, in the absence of alternative preservation techniques, it was standard practice to pickle practically everything, from walnuts and peaches to artichokes and eggs.
Amelia Simmons advised pickling cucumbers in white wine vinegar, with added cloves, mace, nutmeg, white peppercorns, “long pepper,” and ginger. Harriott Pinckney Horry’s 1770 Recipt Book has a similar recipe, “To Mango Muskmellons and Cucumbers and to pickle French Beans, firkins, etc.,” also said good, with a little adaptation, for oranges.
Preservation by pickling works by immersing the food in an acid solution — most commonly vinegar — which prevents the growth of microorganisms and accompanying food spoilage. Vinegar is an invention of unspecified but considerable antiquity. The Babylonians made it from dates, the ancient Chinese from rice and barley, and the Spartans used it in their notorious black broth, a mix of pork stock, vinegar, and salt that sounds a bit like hot-and-sour soup. Apparently it wasn’t. According to the Athenians, consumption of it explained the Spartans’ legendary bravery in battle: black broth was so awful that anyone compelled to eat it was willing to die.
Everybody loved pickles. Pickles even prodded the ordinarily scientific Thomas Jefferson into poetry: “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally’s cellar.” Benjamin Franklin recommended pickles for “squeamish stomachs”; Cleopatra attributed her beauty to pickles; and Amerigo Vespucci — our nation’s namesake — started life as a pickle seller.
Sour Wine
Our word vinegar is derived from the French vin aigre, or “sour wine,” reflecting its first major European source, as a by-product of the wine-making industry. Wine goes sour under the ministrations of a bacterium called Acetobacter, which consumes the existing alcohol, leaving behind a mixture of 4 percent acetic acid in water. A similar bacterial process sours beer to yield malt vinegar, and apple juice to yield the American specialty, cider vinegar. In the absence of any kind of vinegar, frontier families pickled their produce in the ever-available corn whiskey.
Pickles were endlessly popular in the nineteenth century, often the only taste relief in a monotonous diet of meat and potatoes. “A dinner or lunch without pickles of some kind is incomplete,” stated Good Housekeeping magazine in 1884. Today more than half the cucumbers grown in the United States are made into pickles, and Americans consume an annual nine pounds of pickles apiece — a national 26 billion pickles per year.
The most famous pickle in American history is almost certainly the signature pickle of Pittsburgh’s Henry J. Heinz. Heinz’s biography is the quintessential Horatio Alger story: by the age of eight, Henry was selling surplus vegetables from the family garden; by twelve, he’d gone commercial, with his own 3½-acre plot of land. By the 1860s, he was selling bottled horseradish; in the 1870s, he started bottling pickles; and in 1876 — a landmark year for Heinz — he introduced the tomato ketchup that made both his fortune and his name.
By 1888, Henry had a 22-acre factory complex outside of Pittsburgh, complete with steam heat, electric lights, “equine palaces” for the 110 jet-black Heinz horses (who pulled cream-colored wagons trimmed in pickle green), and a 1,200-seat auditorium with a stained glass dome. The pickle became a national icon in 1893, when Henry passed out free pickle-shaped watch charms (stamped with the name HEINZ) at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. By 1896, Henry had a forty-foot electric pickle dazzling the residents of New York City on Fifth Avenue.
Burpee’s 1888 seed catalog carried the Serpent or Snake cucumber, which grew up to six feet in length, coiled like a snake.
Until the Heinz era, little effort had gone into the improvement of the cucumber. The first notably deliberate attempt at cucumber hybridization resulted in Tailby’s Hybrid, a high-yield large-fruited cucumber introduced to gardens in 1872. It was carried in Burpee’s 1888 catalog, along with 19 other cucumber varieties, including the Russian or Khiva Netted cucumber, oval with a white-netted brown skin, said to be “well adapted for cold, bleak situations,” and the Serpent or Snake cucumber, which grew up to six feet in length, coiled like a snake. Seed purveyors Vilmorin-Andrieux describe this last in The Vegetable Garden (1885), adding that when ripe it exudes “a strong odour of Melons.” Among their other twenty-seven listed cucumber cultivars is the Bonneuil Large White, a sweetly scented, papaya-shaped cucumber grown near Paris exclusively for use in perfumes.
Vilmorin-Andrieux suggests that growers straighten their market cucumbers (“as one good and straight Cucumber is worth nearly a dozen small and deformed ones”) and describes a method for doing so, by forcing the young fruits into open-ended cylindrical glasses. More than a thousand workers were employed in this task in one English market garden, according to Vilmorin-Andrieux, which somehow brings to mind such horticultural oddities as Lewis Carroll’s gardeners painting the roses red in Wonderland. Those cucumbers too far gone in deformity were brutally sent to the pickle factory.
The obsession with straightening the cucumber is an ancient one. Early Chinese growers suspended stones from the ends of fruits with a tendency to curl, and modern breeders have selected for straightness, along with such traits as size, yield, disease resistance, flavor, and that commercial bugbear, shelf life. Innumerable cultivars are available today including many time-honored heirloom breeds, among them the Lemon, which looks like one; the White Wonder, a dull ivory color; the tiny Crystal Apple; and the dirigible-shaped Zeppelin.
Flavor in garden cucumbers has been plagued by bitterness, the occasional mouthful of which still gives a chilling reminder of what cucumber-eating was like in the bad old days of the prehistoric Himalayan wilds. The bitterness is due to a class of compounds called cucurbitacins, terpene derivatives that are as repulsive to certain insect pests as they are to human beings. Cucurbitacin-less mutants have been developed, enabling growers to produce crops of nonbitter cucumbers, but the tastier fruits, chemically disarmed, are consequently more susceptible to insect damage.
Bitterness varies from crop to crop and from year to year — even from cucumber to cucumber — with no real explanation to date as to just why. Some varieties are more prone to bitterness than others; but in all cases bitterness seems related to stress: too much chilly weather, for example, or not enough rain.
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Lemuel Gulliver, on his post-Lilliput voyage to Laputa, ran into what may have been the first of the scientific cucumbers. Their caretaker, reported Gulliver, “had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”
Sex and Size
Cucumbers, like their relatives, the melons, squashes, and pumpkins, are monoecious. The flowers, showy yellow-orange numbers with five-lobed corollas, either possess five (male) stamens or a single (female) pistil with three stigmas. The males usually grow in clusters; the females are loners.
Many pickling cultivars these days, however, are sexual oddities. Botanically known as gynoecious plants, these vines bear only female flowers and consequently produce unusually heavy crops. Even odder are parthenocarpic cucumbers, which seem to have escaped the sexual rat race altogether. They set fruit without benefit of pollination and thus produce no seeds. To succeed at this, the plants must be closely protected from invading pollen, a feat difficult enough to quadruple the price of the seedless offspring.
As well as de-sexing the cucumber, breeders have made them small. The trailing vines of the standard indeterminate cultivar nab for themselves four square feet or so of garden living space; bush cultivars can occupy less than half that, though space-saving gardeners pay the price in reduced yields. The average standard cultivar produces about fifteen cucumbers per plant; the average bush model, about ten.
It sounds less far-fetched nowadays, though to date no one seems to have put a hand to it. Instead, the Japanese have invented a cucumber-flavored Pepsi, to be used for keeping cool.