By Patricia Winton
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.
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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