Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Cucumbers
When you get right down to it, cucumbers sometimes seem the very essence of "why both-
er?" All you get is a little crunch, a spurt of cool juice and - if you're lucky - a slightly
herbaceous bitterness. Still, when the weather turns hot and humid, when the air is so thick
that it sticks to your skin, a bite of something crisp and cool can seem like heaven. That's
when we're thankful for cucumbers and all the work that has gone into raising them.
It took centuries of breeding just to make cucumbers edible. Wild cucumbers, which
are found in the Himalayan foothills, are almost impossibly bitter. That someone once saw
promise in this fruit is a tribute to the power of optimism (or extreme hunger). In fact,
cucumbers are first cousins of the bitter melon, which is still appreciated in Southeast
Asia. Both are members of the Cucurbit family, along with melons and winter and summer
squash. As you can tell, this is one of the more varied families in all of horticulture, and
that variety holds true with cucumbers as well.
Thousands of years of domestication have resulted in a bewildering variety of cucum-
bers. Not so long ago it seemed that you could find only one kind of cucumber - the familiar
long, darkgreen one, usually heavily coated with wax. But today you can find all kinds of
cucumbers in the market, seemingly coming from every corner of the globe. There are Per-
sian cucumbers, Chinese cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, English
cucumbers and Middle Eastern cucumbers. Some are more than a foot long, and others are
only as big around as your pinkie. Some are warty; others are smooth. They come in every
shade of green and even lemon yellow.
Although this range of variety is fascinating to horticulturists, it is less so to cooks. The
one thing all cucumbers have in common is that they taste like cucumbers. Sure, there are
very slight variations in degree of bitterness, and some cucumbers are a little crisper than
others (although both of these traits are usually more attributable to farming than to genet-
ics).
But other than that, cucumbers are all pretty much the same. Even the so-called lemon
cucumbers get their name for the way they look - round and yellow when ripe - rather
than the way they taste. The biggest difference between cucumbers, and the easiest way
to differentiate among them for culinary purposes, is the thickness of the skin. Cucumbers
