Cucumber Sauce
Could be purchased by the jar at a local grocers in American Cities in the decade before the Civil War. Ads appear in numbers of newspapers. What was it they were calling cucumber sauce? Surely not the chopped cucumbers and yoghurt concoction—tzatziki—that refreshes many a Greek dish. Nor could it be the white sauce with minced dill pickles that is described in the first American recipe under the name cucumber sauce (1833) see below.
Part of the problem was that the category of sauces became only significant in general cookery after the cook stove made the temperature control needed in establishing emulsions and sauces generally available. Sauces before that 1830s could be gravies, pan juices, fruit emulsions, and a range of other things. For instance it might be what we might now consider a relish. Below is a cucumber and white onion mixture in vinegar that could be sold in a jar without refrigeration. Is this what was meant.
Cucumbers were considered the ultimate summer vegetable—light, succulent, and cooling. So cucumber sauces tended over the course of the 1800s to gravitate away from white gravies to mixtures of chopped cucumbers and mayonnaise or cream, to be served with poached fish. While the pickle and mayo combination gave rise to tartar sauce, the raw cucumbers , may, salt, and an herb (dill, mint, basil) gave rise to the “cucumber sauce” of the mid 1870s. (See recipe #3)
The fine dining frenchification of cucumber sauce took place in the 1890s—in the peak of the gilded age. Crushed cucumbers were incorporated into cream, or coconut cream, lemon juice and seasoning.
This is not too far a step from Tzatziki.