Killer Cucumbers

I take as my text this page of free-for-all footnotes to Pepys' Diary, on the subject of cucumbers, as it serves as a pretty good selective social history of the vegetable. I was led there from a line in a song in Gay's Beggar's Opera:

As men should serve a cowcumber, she flings herself away

Serve, of course, mainly as in "treat", not as in "arrange nicely on a plate". Cowcumber was the prevailing spelling and pronunciatiom. One of those Pepys footnotes quotes "It is said that the antique name of cowcumber arose because the fruit was thought fit only for cows". Said by whom we don't know. It's not the full-on etymology, which in either its cow- or cu- form comes straight from the Latin cucumis, but could at a pinch explain a cheeky variation.

Certainly the cucumber was not in much favour in the days of Pepys or Gay. It shows up in Pepys' diary in a health scare: on September 22nd 1663, Pepys hears of the second man allegedly dead from eating that particular green peril within the space of days.
On the subject of flinging cucumbers away, the footnote to that line in the Beggar's Opera in my (D. W Lindsay) edition has "Eighteenth-century physicians were said to recommend that a cucumber should be carefully sliced and dressed, then thrown away", which although a lovely image raises more questions than is answers and is ultimately unsatisfactory. I am rather more inclined to think of the excerpt from John Evelyn quoted on that Pepys footnote page: "it not being long, since Cucumber, however dress’d, was thought fit to be thrown away, being accounted little better than Poyson." That's from a 1699 book all about salad, so ought to know. It was published chronologically slap-bang in between Pepys and Gay: so either Gay was behind the times, or else Evelyn's attempts to rehabilitate the cucumber had proved fruitless. The image I'm left with is one of an unwanted garnish of cucumber, probably pickled, ejected from one's food, a tradition which continues for the reviled Big Mac gherkin to this day.

Image by Michael Sporn.

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