ANNABEL LANGBEIN + WINE MATCHES

Keep your cool

Insert a food thermometer into a room temperature cucumber and you may find it registers up to six degrees cooler on the inside. As far back as the 1600s, people have noticed this particular quality in cucumbers – hence the saying “as cool as a cucumber”. In 1615, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher used the expression in their play. Cupid’s Revenge: “Young maids were as cold as cucumbers.”

It’s not just cucumbers that hold their cool. Other dense fruits (cucumbers are actually a fruit, not a vegetable) with a very high water content, including watermelons, also have the ability to stay cool inside their skins. The reason for this is that water doesn’t absorb heat as readily as air and more energy is required to heat the inside than the air that surrounds it. But no one ever says “as cool as a watermelon” – it just doesn’t have the same ring.

With a water content that sits at around 90-95 per cent, cucumbers have very little to offer in the way of fibre, vitamins or minerals but what they lack in the nutrition stakes, they more than make up for in terms of pure refreshment. And containing a mere 10 calories per 100g of flesh, cucumbers are hugely popular among the diet crowd.

They make happy partners with a wide range of flavours and textures from creamy yoghurt, sour cream and feta cheese to walnuts, olives, tomatoes, sesame and all kinds of herbs – dill, mint, coriander, basil and tarragon all work well with their mild flavour.

Vinegar of any description loves cucumber. And hey, let’s not forget gin. One of the best gin and tonics I’ve had was in a trendy little bar on the shores of the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey. My cocktail was an almost iridescent green, thanks to the addition of pureed sweet lebanese cucumbers. I managed to ascertain that the cucumbers had been de-seeded and then blitzed up with a little mint. The resulting juice was then sieved into a long glass with a good measure of gin, ice and a dash of tonic. It was delicious beyond all imagination.

Lots of people love apple cucumbers and the stubby large-seeded cucumbers that used to be the mainstay crop of summer home gardens. For me, these cucumbers are way too seedy. I want fewer seeds and more of that smooth, cooling flesh. For this reason I always opt to grow lebanese cucumbers, telegraph cucumbers or the long, yellower-skinned sweet korean cucumbers. Pickling cucumber varieties, such as gherkins, are shorter, stouter types with more spines and a drier flesh, allowing them to soak up more of the brine they’re pickled in.

At the peak of the summer cucumber season I’m always looking for new ways to use them up. Here are some ideas.