In cucumber time.

   

     In Saturday's 10th anniversary post, I said this would run as a column Wednesday. But upon a second read, I decided it might be more apt as an EGD exclusive. If you want a post reflecting today's July 4 holiday, the first of many I've written ran 10 years ago today. You can read it here.

     Nature isn't entirely in revolt. Yes, the air stung our eyes last week due to massive Canadian wildfires and the sun looked like the second star in the desert sky in a "Star Wars" movie. Then it rained so hard over the weekend, it was as if the Lord God Almighty were saying, "NASCAR in Chicago? I don't think so..."

     But all is not End Times doom. I planted cucumbers this year, as a lark, and while my tomatoes are still trying to gather themselves and make an appearance, this bad boy was so big I decided to harvest him and try him out at lunch.
     Quite delicious, sliced thin, on a fresh bagel from Once Upon a Bagel in Highland Park, which really ought to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
     "Cucumber.' Now there's a word you don't think about much. I tried playing my guess-the-origins word game. Cucumber. It sounds British, doesn't it? Like "North Umberland." Maybe a Franco-Saxon mash-up: "que cumber"?
     Not close. French, "concombre," from the Latin, "cucumis" pronounced, "koo-koo mis."
     The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a "creeping plant ... native of southern Asia, from ancient times cultivated for its fruit..."
     Stop right there. Cucumbers are not the vegetables that we — okay, I — assumed them to be, but fruits, with more in common with cantaloupes and watermelons than salad denizens like lettuce or radishes. (I almost included tomatoes, but those I already accept, grudgingly, as fruits).
     Which leads to the difference between fruits and vegetables, which I should know, but don't, meaning some of you must not either. I hope. Fruits are ... checking ... from the flowering parts of the plant — those involved in reproduction. While vegetables ... are from the leaves, stems, roots, bulbs. So seeds are the giveaway — if it has seeds, the germs of reproduction, then it's fruit. Thus corn, peppers, zucchini, all fruits. Next time the subject comes up, you can say, with confidence, "Well, if it has seeds, then it must be a fruit." 

     Of course, using that definition, a loaf of rye bread with caraway seeds is a fruit. But you know what I mean...
     Returning to the subject at hand, the OED cites a line from Wyclif in 1382: "Where cumeris, that ben bitter herbis, waxen."
     When I sliced the cucumber and applied it to bread, I really didn't think about the fine tradition I was following, but there in the OED's second definition: "The long fleshy fruit of this plant, commonly eaten (cut into thin slices) as a cooling salad, and when young used for pickling."

     Eating a cucumber sandwich, I didn't think of it as "a cucumber sandwich," did not think of Algernon being unable to stop eating them in "The Importance of Being Earnest." In all candor, I'd never have thought of consuming them that way — to me, cucumbers are diced and scattered on salads. But my wife suggested it. 
     Speaking of grace under pressure, "cool as a cucumber" is almost 300 years old, tracing to Gay Poems of 1732. Though the OED overlooks "As cold as cucumbers" in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Cupid's Revenge" in 1615, it does note that, as slang, cucumber denotes, "some obscure reference to a tailor. Hence cucumber time." (The association having to do with once popular songs referring to early summer. "Tailors could not be expected to earn much money 'in cucumber season' ... Because when cucumbers are in, the gentry are out of town.'")
    Are they ever. My neighborhood feels emptied out when I walk the dog. Well, I'm not in Tucson or Tuscany or Tuscaloosa or one of the garden spots the we well-heeled have fled to. I'm right here. Doing this.

    There are no cucumbers in Shakespeare. But two references in the Old Testament, and both are metaphors. In Jeremiah, the gods of others are "like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk."

     Even more evocative is Isaiah 1:8, “And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.”
    Other translations call it "a hut in a field of cucumbers," referring to a shack that farmers would put in their fields and occupy at night to guard their crops against plunder. Aka, a very lonely place. So if you are, to pluck a random example from the air, quarantining due to COVID today instead of having holiday fun with friends, as you'd planned, you can say you feel like you're in a hut in a cucumber patch, in case that helps. Which it doesn't.
    We can't ignore "Gulliver's Travels." The first bearded, disheveled scholar that Gulliver encounters at the Grand Academy of Lagado "had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." The researcher predicts that in eight more years he might find success, observing that "this had been a very dear season for cucumbers" and — just to show you that nothing ever changes in academe — imploring Gulliver "to give him something as an encouragement to his ingenuity" and our intrepid traveler, provided with cash by his host for this very purpose, does so.
     To my surprise, Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang has a reference, not to the fruit's phallic shape, but to its color: "cucumber n. A dollar, 1935: '... It may be against the law to say that a doll whose pap has all these cucumbers is dumb.' Runyon."
     The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that "the food value of the cucumber is low," which initially struck me as unkind, but then I realized they were referring calories, and they recovered anyway by adding, "but its delicate flavour makes it popular for salads and relishes."
     The delicate flavor made me think of a usage learned from high end health clubs — as a garnish to water. So while most the literal first fruit of my garden this year went into sandwiches, the remnant was added to a glass of seltzer, then nibbled as a cool closing grace note to the beverage and the debut cuke of the season. More are on deck.

 Critters getting this fellow were only a slight concern, since he was raised in a large container. But I do wish I'd waited for that  extra half ounce, so he could weigh in at a full pound before being eaten.