The Well-Traveled Cucumber

By Patricia Winton

What could be more British than afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches and cake? There might be other things served as well, scones or buns, sandwiches with fillings of fish or meat, but the cucumber variety is de rigueur. However difficult they are to eat with their leaky, slippery filling, cucumber sandwiches are as British as, well, the Queen.

So how did it all start? Cucumbers, it seems, first traveled to Britain with the Roman invaders (ca. 43-400 AD). By the time their conquest began, cucumbers were standard fare in Rome. The Emperor Tiberius (42 BC–37 AD) was a great cucumber lover. Pliny writes that he ate them every day. In fact, Tiberius created movable frames mounted on wheels that could be rolled into the sunshine and moved back to protected space during the cold. This device enabled him to eat cucumbers year round, a precursor to the modern greenhouse.

Cucumber sandwiches did not appear on the scene until long after the Romans departed. Anna, seventh Duchess of Bedford, began the custom of afternoon tea in the early 19th century. A greedy gal, so the legend goes, she found it impossible to wait until dinnertime and had her servants prepare a snack for her in mid-afternoon. Her friends duplicated her repast, and a tradition was born. By the height of the Victorian era, afternoon tea had become an ingrained habit, and these little cucumber treats ruled the tea table.

Proper cucumber sandwiches have three ingredients: thin slices of dense white bread with the crust removed, butter, and cucumbers slices—also thin. The first time I saw someone British make them, she spread butter on the unsliced bread before cutting it. This method, she explained, allowed her to cut thinner slices which would have crumbled if she had tried to spread the butter after cutting. The cucumbers are placed on the buttered bread and topped with a twin. Each sandwich is cut in half, usually diagonally, then in half again to produce four small tidbits.

These little bites accompanied tea in the drawing room and on the cricket pitch for a couple of centuries, though the tradition may be waning now. When the British colonized India, they took their cricket with them, though it was some time before the locals were allowed to play. With cricket came the tea break and cucumber sandwiches.

The sandwiches came with the cricket, but not the cucumber. You see, the cucumber is a native of India. It made its way to Rome when trade routes opened between the two during the reign of Augustus, who preceded Tiberius as Roman emperor. So Tiberius was enamored of a new, trendy vegetable when he created his growing frames.

Today, cucumbers are grown on almost every continent and global production in 2010 reached 57,559,836 tons. How they traveled to other countries I can’t say, though probably without armed intervention. They certainly went from India to Rome without military might, but the trips to Britain and back to India again resulted from conquests.

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The Cutting Edge

By Patricia Winton

As a child, I was mesmerized by a pair of scissors in my great-great aunt’s handwork basket. They were shaped somewhat like a Great Blue Heron, with an elongated bill as the blades. She made lace by tatting, and she used these little scissors to clip the thread. She had a piece of red string tied to one of the finger holes, which she said helped her find the scissors in the bottom of her work basket.

She died when I was seven, but she gave me those scissors before she went. I have them still, tucked into my sewing basket in Rome.

This early fascination with scissors, I suppose, made it inevitable that by now I would own more than a dozen pairs. I have scissors in every room and a pair on the terrace. I hate struggling to open recalcitrant packaging, so I like to have scissors handy to do the job for me.

Folding Scissors

I carry them in my pencil case and my book bag. I even have a small pair with blades that retract into the handles, making them security friendly at airports because it’s impossible to stab someone with them. I also have a special pair for cutting buttonholes after making them with a sewing machine.

As I began thinking about inventions for this post, scissors seemed like the place to begin. Leonardo da Vinci has been erroneously credited with inventing them, but they’re much older than that.

The first scissors were probably forged around 1500 B.C. in Egypt from a single piece of bronze. The metal was bent into an elongated U shape with the tips flattened into blades. To cut, the user had to squeeze the handle, forcing the two blades to cross each other.

Scissors from ancient Egypt

Examples of this type of scissors have been unearthed in archaeological sites in Egypt, Asia, and Roman settlements throughout Italy. A Grecian urn dated around 220 B.C. contains an image of scissors.

The modern type of scissors, with two blades held together with a rivet or screw were invented in ancient Rome around 100 A.D. Roman-era documents relating to guilds cite scissors as tools used by tailors, haberdashers, and smiths. The guilds for tailors, drapers, and leather workers also designed scissors into their crests.

By around 1000 A.D. there were even guilds for scissor makers. The scissors at that time were made by hand, and the maker who could produce a fine blade was very much in demand. And while Leonardo obviously didn’t invent scissors, he probably made some improvements to their design, thereby making them easier to use.

The real breakthrough in the evolution of scissors came in 1761, when Robert Hinchliffe of Sheffield, England, first used cast steel to manufacture them. The molten steel was poured into molds, creating a uniformity that ensured their faithful reproduction. From this period until late 19th century, scissors often had elaborately designed handles, but designs were simplified to better accommodate mass production later on.

Buttonhole Scissors

Now, there are many specialized scissors: blunt-tipped, blunt-bladed scissors for children; pinking shears for dressmakers; curved-bladed ones for clipping toenails; decorated blades for crafts; and indescribable ones for snipping nose hair.

So as I look at my little Great Blue Heron scissors, I’m amused to think that I live in the city where this type of scissors got their start.
 



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