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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It's Just Not Cricket*

(Photo: B. Sandman)

On April 2, a most spectacular event occurred: India won its first Cricket World Cup in 28 years. I know it was spectacular because even though I don’t follow much of the sport, a global cheer was heard from Indians around the world. It’s a surprise the Internet didn’t shut down with all the high-five-ing that occurred on every social media outlet the instant the winning wicket was won.

Which, of course, led to the most popular joke going viral that day: “good luck getting IT support on the phone.” Clearly, ethnic Indians everywhere were taking the day off to watch the match. And then the rest of the week to party.

But amidst all the jubilation, there was also this major feel-good moment, one I wanted to embrace but couldn’t quite wrap my head around. Indians everywhere felt united by this victory – we were all just one big, happy family. It sounded so positive, so right, but felt so … off. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, nor did I really give it much thought. (I mean, it was only cricket, right?)

Until I read this article.  

Novelist Manu Joseph crystallized my sentiments perfectly when he called this group hug “a deceptive sense of wellbeing.” In India alone, Joseph so aptly explains, daily life “is a fierce contest between the affluent and the educated on the one side, and the brooding impoverished on the other. The pursuit of India’s elite is to protect themselves from India – from its crowds, dust, heat, poverty, politics, governance and everything else that is in plain sight. To achieve this, they embed themselves in their private islands that the forces and the odors of the republic cannot easily penetrate.”

And, he says, “The islands that protect Indians from India are simple and material: A luxurious car with an unspeaking driver who works for 12 hours every day at less than $200 a month, or at least an S.U.V. with strong metal fenders that can absorb routine minor accidents. A house in a beautiful residential community that the Other Indians can enter only as maids and drivers. Membership in an exclusive club. Essentially a life in a bubble…”

Joseph’s theory brings to mind the title of an old book, A Million Mutinies Now, in which Nobel-winning author V.S. Naipaul calls post-colonial India “a country of a million little mutinies.” In the 20 years since he wrote this travelogue, the disparities have only widened – maybe it’s a billion little mutinies now.

Our group hug wasn’t even fleeting – it was just delusional.

Within a week of India’s World Cup victory, two of the country’s activists went on hunger fasts to force the government to introduce anti-corruption legislation. Though the divide between the haves and have-nots are appalling, and the nation’s bureaucracy and corruption staggering, these powerful stances reminded many people of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance movement and aroused feelings of patriotism among even the most skeptical. Again, global cheers – way to go, men! Show them how it’s done.

Within days, the men called off their fasts when government officials agreed to form a committee aimed at studying the corruption committed by, er, government officials. Woohoo… we … gulp ... won.

Meanwhile, not far off in the Middle East, change has arrived sooner. The ongoing Arab Spring is far from over, but it prompted one observer to wonder if the “heady jasmine scent from North Africa” could “waft across the Arabian Sea to India.”

Soon, I’m thinking, very soon.

In the meantime, there you have it – everything I know about sports, in a nutshell.

* My thanks to Alli for this great headline. "It's just not cricket" is an Aussie term that means "having something that is unjust or just plain wrong done to someone or something. It comes from the game of cricket, which is regarded as a gentleman’s game, where fair play is paramount."