Cucumber: An Origin Story
Originally, I planned to write about pepper this week. It’s a spice most people don’t think about, but which has a rich and interesting history. However, last week’s kimchi post reminded me that I hadn’t written about cucumbers yet, which I also love and which also has an interesting history, albeit murky at best. So we’re doing that today!
What we think of as cucumbers (Cucumis sativus), whether the slicing, pickling, or burpless type (there are a few that fall outside these main categories), have nearly nothing to do with what cucumbers were prior to cultivation, domestication, and selective breeding. The OG cucumber was so bitter due to its high concentration of cucurbitacins, this is not a thing you could really… well… eat, I suppose. This isn’t a massive issue with cucumbers now, but we’ve all had that one awful cucumber!
Without getting overly technical, cucurbitacins are tetracyclic terpenes that, if too much is consumed, actually can hurt you. People presumably washed the gunk off the seeds and ate those, also planting seeds from a well-tasting batch. Over time, this reduced the overall level of cucurbitacins to levels that aren’t dangerous. There are around 88 cases per year where someone will eat too much of a given cucurbit that cross-pollinated with a wild type or was overly stressed during its fruit production. When that happens, the person may develop toxic squash syndrome. Usually they will not die, and will instead experience what seems like random, inexplicable food poisoning.
Here, have a molecule. This is cucurbitacin B, the main one we’re talking about when discussing these guys.
Etymology
The story is a bit complicated and it’s hard to see a valid reason to reinvent the wheel on this one. I am linking an article that has a lot more detail, and I am specifically linking it because until I read this, I did not realize that the Old English word for cucumber was eorðäppel. In fact, I did not know that there even was an Old English word for cucumber. Because the Saxons didn’t have these. This is spelled differently in the article, because Bon Appetit uses the more common and contemporary “d” stand-in instead of the letter eth (ð) that few Anglophones still recognize, which is called edd (ð) in Faroese. I don’t speak Faroese at all, but I have a brain filled with random facts. I am awesome at Trivial Pursuit, until I get to the dreaded Sports and Leisure questions. Eorðäppel does literally mean earth-apple/apple of the earth.
Since the French had cucumbers in the 9th-century, I assume that the Saxons knew about cucumbers from them. They definitely engaged in trade with the Franks, though primarily because the Franks did a seriously bang-up job at making weapons and such way better than anyone else in the region. Famous for it, y’all. Either way, this Saxon term definitely did not come from the Franks, who had another word for them (cucumeres).
I have emailed my (now retired) Old English professor (OEP), Dr. McNamara, and asked him, since no one else I hoped would know did know for sure. He should, I hope, be able to shed some light on the Saxon side of this question. My friend Jessie, however, sent me this article as a possible/likely explanation, and we agree that this hypothesis does make sense. I also sent a message to my favorite medievalist professor, Dr. Stock, as she’s fluent in Old French and might able to discover some interesting info on how this happened from the Frankish end of things.
This is what Dr. Stock has said so far, though she also said she’ll at various sources she has:
Pome or pomme has first meaning of fruit, second apple. Pommel, on saddles came from the round fruit-like knob. I found no combination of pome and terre. Unfortunately, these dictionaries don’t have reverse listings from English or modern French to OF. I have a big collection of books about medieval cooking and recipes (usually adaptations of medieval recipes that were maddeningly vague— gourds could refer to any kind of veg in the squash family) for the modern cook. I found recipes that said gourd could refer to any squash or zucchini or CUCUMBER!
Edit to this post with new information from Dr. Stock:
Regarding the transmission of seeds, don’t discount the transmission by birds in their droppings. I have had “volunteer” castor bean plants in my pre-flood and post-flood yard. Cucumber seeds might have been transmitted the same way, not necessarily through human to human transfer.
Regarding what “pomme de terre” (which is not listed as a term in dictionaries of 11th-15th-century French) might allude to— I found in cookbooks of medieval recipes for modern cooks recipes including turnips, parsnips, carrots, and beets as ingredients. All of these might be labeled “fruits of the earth.” Also lots of recipes used cabbage, brussels sprouts (called “little cabbages”) and the like; Onions, garlic, and leeks were the go-to “trinity" of bases for recipes, much akin to Creole/Cajun onions, celery, and green pepper as their “trinity." Potatoes and tomatoes and peppers are (of course) New World crops that were brought back by the explorers of the Americas to Europe. Chaucer’s Summoner famously ate onions, garlic, and leeks, the very ingredients that were thought to exacerbate his skin condition of alopecia/roseacia (sp.?) that produced “whelks” on his cheeks.
I browsed through my collection of books on history of food/cooking with emphasis on medieval and Renaissance pd. I looked in indices for “cucumber.” I did not find much.
Real Tannahill, Food in History (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1973; 1988): “Evidence of ‘probably cultivated’ cucumbers at Spirit Cave in Thailand (provisionally dated at c. 9750 BC)”. (p. 38); cucumbers were “among the raw materials of the Sumerian diet” c. 2300 BC (p. 47); China imported cucumbers during the Han period (p. 133); no mention of cucumbers for medieval Europe.
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food (trans. From French by Anthea Bell)(Basil Blackwell, 1992; rpt. NY: Barnes & Noble Books, 1998): In the section on 17-18th-century,
"The first written mention of gherkins is not found until 1549, when it occurs in the work of Robert Estienne, although cucumbers (and gherkins are only a small variety of rough-skinned cucumber) had been eaten in India for more than 30 centuries, with salt or lemon juice; we use vinegar instead. Few of us realize how exotic the gherkin once was. Gherkins came to Europe during the Renaissance. The English ‘gherkin,’ like the related German Gurke (for cucumbers and gherkins alike), comes ultimately from Greek aggourion” (p. 529).
That’s all that comes up in the index.
Lorna J. Sass, To the King’s Taste: Richard II’s Book of Feasts and Recipes adapted for modern cooking (NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975) has a recipe for Gourd soup. She quotes a 14c recipe for gourd soup that calls for “young gourds.” She cites John Gerard, Leaves from Gerard’s Herball (New York, 1969) p. 184 for the following explanation of what “gourds” might mean to a 14th-century audience: “ There are divers sorts of Gourds, some wilde, others tame of the garden: some bearing fruit like unto a bottle; others long, bigger at the end, keeping no certain form or fashion; some greater, others lesse.” Sass then explains: "Perhaps young gourds are those with soft skins, like cucumber and zucchini.” pp. 42-43. But her connection between "young gourds" and cucumbers is pure speculation.
Sorry I could not find more.
This is very helpful. It tells us, at least so far, that the choice to employ eorðäppel may stem from its potential use as a generic catch-all phrase for fruits/vegetables there was no other word for.
Also, I love that birds plant things for us. A lot.
I’ll edit this post to reflect more answers, if we are able to get some more exposition on this. I seriously hope we can find out, and this isn’t just yet another weird set of medieval food questions landing in their inboxes from me! Otherwise, to quote Jessie, “all it took was one confused translator thinking ‘what the hell is a cucumber? Oh well, I guess it’s a generic apple of the earth now!’” It’s really hard to argue against that reasoning, because really weird stuff does happen a lot during translation. A lot of weird stuff. A lot.
This is an example of their finery during this time. I showed a different picture to Ross, who sadly told me it was 8th-century. It was a much cooler picture, but alas.
I didn’t explain why I was asking, though I could tell he really wanted to know because he is totally a weapons guy. I am not, typically. Except that for him, it extends to literally every weapon ever made. He seemingly knows them all, and is baffled that I nod and smile when he tells me about this or that obscure historical weapon from who knows where (wasn’t listening). I asked him once if there are weapons he doesn’t know, and after a full minute of thinking, he told me he’d struggle to tell the difference between two also obscure weapons that I don’t remember the names of, for reasons I also don’t remember (I tried that time, but failed). What baffled me was that he had to work so hard to find weapons in his brain that he didn’t feel he knew at least adequately. How does someone even know that much about anything?
He knows this stuff so well that whenever possible, I used to have him come teach a 16th-century weapons class session to my kids during the semesters I taught The Three Musketeers or whatever other nonsense I was tormenting my kids with that semester that involved a need for some kind of “beyond cursory” weapons knowledge. They loved his weapons classes. Anyway, now he’s found out that somehow, despite all reason, I’m actually interested in this. So I’m doomed, y’all. Doomed.
Although he read so much of my writing during grad school that he’s not-so-secretly relieved to normally not have to read anything else I’m up to now, he did end up having to review this post for me (no one was available to Zoom at that time, though Ben graciously stepped in later to do so), and he laughed when he got to this part. He said to tell y’all that the new handle on the axe is wrong, and that it should have a long, straight, pole-type handle. He had a lengthy thinking-out-loud set of commentary on the helmet, but that all culminated in him simply saying that this was a much better choice of picture than the one I really wanted, because accurate, and that these are really beautiful, well-made examples of period arms.
He also said, after finishing his review, that this is “the most informative ‘I don’t know’ I’ve ever read” about this post. That’s pretty accurate, I think.
Vines and Fruits
To get back on track, because wow veered off there, where’d we get cucumbers from?
India! Specifically, the very mysterious “somewhere” in that portion of the Himalayas. There’s evidence of a different kind of cucumber, whose seeds were excavated in 1970, that carbon dated back to 9750 BCE!
Map!
Cucumbers bop around this general area for a while, being cultivated into something a bit less bitter (but still not like ours), and make it to China around 2000 years ago, spreading throughout the rest of Asia as well. There’s debate about what happened with cucumbers in the Middle East and Europe, since a lot of sources date this to around the same time cukes make it to China. We see literary evidence of cucumbers/similar in the Gilgamesh poem, the bible, and also in Egyptian records. So, long history of noms here.
Most of the debate, however, surrounds linguistic and symbolic history, and which specific species of plant is being referenced in various historical sources. What we do know for sure is that by c. 530 CE, there is definitive written evidence of cucumbers in a Syriac medical text. Other references to cucumbers pop out throughout the region over the next several centuries.
What happens in Europe is anyone’s guess, because we do have early Greek and Roman records of cucumbers or something like them, but these cucumbers were definitely too bitter to eat without cooking. Most sources do accept that if they weren’t cucumbers, they really were close. I’m hedging all of this because we legit do not know what the truth here is (which of course makes trying to find out so much more interesting!). They were popular, though, and so much so that a version of green housing was used to grow them off season.
Prevailing wisdom states that the Franks got cucumbers around the 9th-century, that the English got them around the 14th, and North America in the mid-16th when Europeans were trying to form colonies in North America. We are pretty sure that this is all accurate cucumber history, and definitely sure that by the 13th-century, we are seeing sources on actual cucumbers, so that’s excellent news!
Because I am an eighteenth-centuryist with a particular interest in Swift, I feel compelled to include this portion of the narrator’s experience in Gulliver’s Travels watching scientists in Laputa try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers!
The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers." I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.
Map of Laputa by Arthur Rackham.
This colonial exploration of the future States and Canada really doesn’t pan too well until the 17th, but the cucumbers, it seems, did make it through their long journey unscathed. For sure, the seeds left by failed missions did get some action once Jamestown was established. Also, there’s some evidence that Columbus brought cucumbers to Haiti, influencing ideas on how cucumbers survived their early adventures in the New World! Like so many Columbus-related narratives, this may totally be made up that he brought these, so just be aware of that. So much uncertain history with this fruit! Y’all know at least the basics of colonial history of the Americas already, I’m sure, so I’ll skip the larger details this time.
For those of you who need to brush up on some of this history, here’s a map from 1656, almost 100 years after failed English colonial attempts. “Nicolas Sanson’s map of New Mexico and Florida offered Europeans their first detailed view of the American Southwest, and for decades convinced many that California was an island.”
The Evolution of the Cucumber
At this point, we’ve seen some interesting and confusing history, but what happens after this is definitively known. Cucumbers get popular! They also get a ton of attention from gardeners, who strove to make them more diverse and palatable.
Over this period, we start seeing more transition away from the bumpy, gherkin type cucumbers (largely used for pickling or cooking), and toward a broader range of possible uses. It should be noted that this does have a hiccup during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, due to medical beliefs about eating uncooked veg.
Slicing cucumbers, like the standard straight 8s you get at the grocery store, get big. New types of pickling cucumbers, too. And then, the burpless type. Aside from making people burp less than other cucumber types do (and this is literally why they’re called burpless), this less bitter, smooth-skinned type of cucumber becomes really popular basically everywhere but America. You would know these best as English cucumbers, which generally come wrapped in plastic due to their incredibly thin, delicate (also not bitter) skin.
As an aside, you can use cucumber skins in place of aloe for minor burns.
English cucumber, still partly in plastic. Charles Deluvio/Getty
We should also note that during the Victorian era, this was this massive and strange push toward the straight cucumbers we’re used to being the norm. Here’s a weird little device to see, which is one of many ways in which straight cukes happen!
Glass cucumber straightener. No lies.
In 1876, Henry J. Heinz does the most influential thing regarding cucumbers possible: he markets pickles. PICKLES! I love pickles. Pickles were, in part, beloved during this period of American expansion because it was believed they could still prevent scurvy post-pickling. This is generally not going to be the case, because pickled and not fermented lose their C during the canning process. Fermented cucumber pickles have more vitamin C than their fresh counterparts, and refrigerator pickles still have vitamin C.
Heinz? Legit marketing genius. These are trading cards. He also put out keychains, bookmarks, and all sorts of other cool cucumber/pickle-related ephemera.
You guys pretty much know the rest from here, which is that cucumbers are ubiquitous in culinary life in modernity, and that there are a crazy number of kinds! Somewhere around 100-200 different cultivars now exist, meaning there is a kind of cucumber for everyone!
A few kinds of cucumbers. I have a tiny lemon cucumber plant growing currently on one of my stunted tomato plants. This plant volunteered to root itself from a pot of plants onto the actual soil because it realized before I did that the pot of plants was going to die before cucumbers happened. It’s now in flower, and I hope that I can avoid the neglect that would kill this tough little guy, too!
Odds and Ends
Although this has probably not been a particularly informative exposition on cucumbers (though definitely a ton of exposition on other topics), I do have a few other odds and ends to share. Cucumbers have a lot of health benefits, helping out with hangovers (so now you have an alternative to Gatorade and Taco Bell to recover from that?), plus arthritis and gout pain relief. This is done by lowering uric acid levels in the body.
Cucumber is also a last name! Not a particularly common one, but there are still Cucumbers in at least the States. I rabbit hole too easily to be willing to check other localities.
My last thing to share is a really weird and omgyes video a Christian friend showed me during the late 1990s. I love this video endlessly, though Child Tester thinks I’ve lost my mind any time I show it to her. This may also be because she doesn’t particularly care for either tomatoes or cucumbers if they aren’t cooked.
