ISSUE 62, RELISH, Part 1: Cucumber Relish, A Mystery
Sliced Cucumber Relish – Solving a southern culinary mystery.
If you look at old menus a long time you begin to wonder about some things. Particularly about categorizations. I noted “sliced cucumber relish” on numbers of high end banquet menus from Charleston and Savannah in the 1800s. When I first came across the dish I presumed that it was the classic fresh sliced cucumbers dressed in an oil and vinegar dressing. Except that some menus also listed cucumber salad. Now I knew the 19th century saw a revision in the sense of what relish meant from the older pre-1800 idea of an ideal accompanying dish for a main course protein (cranberry sauce for turkey, mashed turnips for mutton, mint jelly for lamb, apple sauce for pork) to a more general idea of an appetite stimulant that incorporated acid, salt, or sugar (think on the relish tray). So what was “sliced cucumber relish” in the Lowcountry if it was not vinegary cucumber salad or pickles?
Sometimes answers come unexpectedly when looking for other things. I was on the trail of pepper relish, particularly the hot kind using bird peppers (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum), the small peppers that made the earliest southern pepper sauces and West Indian aji dishes. In a Charleston paper of 1853 I came across a blurb giving the recipe of a dish designed as an appetite stimulant using sliced cucumbers, bird peppers, and an ingredient beloved of Lowcountry gastronomes, Madeira. It was called Man dran, and though it was identified as West Indian, I suspect it appeared in the Charleston Courier because it would be immediately recognizable to locals with any sort of banquet experience. Since talking with Chef B. J. Dennis, and since visiting Trinidad in 2016, I’ve been paying closer attention to how island cookery maps onto Lowcountry fare. Madeira is not a cheap ingredient, hence the appearance on high end banquet menus. So—what do you think? A plausible solution to a culinary mystery?