Cucumber sandwiches anyone?

It seems extraordinary now that we have (pre Corona!) multiple restaurants, cafés, coffee bars and fast food chains, that there was a time when there were very few places to go out to eat.  Certainly growing up in Johannesburg, apart from hotel restaurants and the main railway station, there were very few places to eat out.  There were tea rooms in the department stores and one or two restaurants in “town”.  

Pasta was macaroni or spaghetti, rice was white and bread was white or brown and rye bread from the kosher deli. My parents adored food - if we wanted asparagus we grew them and if we wanted lasagne my mother, with the cook, would make the sheets of pasta by hand.

We had over an acre of vegetable garden and as the keen gardeners out there will know, everything ripens at once. My sister in Los Angeles is in a similar situation but with the addition of goats, chickens, quail and a miniature cow so has a pantry full of bottled fruit, jams, chutneys and everyone who visits receives food parcels including cheeses and – honey from the beehives.

What do you do with cucumbers? My favourite was “bread and butter pickle”.  I don’t know why it was called that – the original recipe came from The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, first published in the USA in 1931 and my mother’s now very tattered edition was bought in 1945. The sub-heading is A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with an Occasional Culinary Chat. Before the internet you could find out how to cook almost anything from that book.

Rombauer’s recipe starts “1 gallon firm cucumbers”.  My mother’s recipe is probably scaled down from that for my more modest requirements but I am sure she used gallons of cucumbers when they were picked and she certainly preserved them in sterilised jars.  Here it is:

Bread and Butter Pickle

1 kilo cucumbers (small ones are best, must be very firm)

½ kilo small onions very thinly sliced

50 grams salt

300 ml cider vinegar (if you have it substitute 50 ml with distilled vinegar)

175 gms sugar

1 tab mustard seeds

1 teas celery seeds

1 teas whole cloves

½ teas turmeric

Wash but do not peel the cucumbers. Cut into slices about 2-3 mm thick  and similarly with the onions. Layer in a glass or ceramic container, sprinkling the salt between the layers.  Cover with cling film and place a heavy weight on top and leave for about four hours in the fridge.  

Drain and rinse under cold water and leave to dry on kitchen paper. Put the rest of the ingredients in a saucepan on a medium heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cucumber and onion and bring to the boil again. As soon as it is boiling take it off the heat and cool.

You can eat it immediately but best left for a day or two in the fridge where it will keep for a couple of weeks. If you are going to store it for longer it needs to be bottled in sterilised glass jars.

Note:  I have reduced the amount of sugar in the original recipe but you need to taste and decide.