Serves: 4 as a side salad
Takes: 10 minutes preparation time + 15 minutes for vegetables to marinate
Ingredients
for the salad:
2 baby cucumbers or half a full-length cucumber
1/2 fresh fennel bulb, with fronds attached
1 lemon
200 g washed salad greens of choice, such as mâche, endive, leaf mustard or lettuce
1/2 preserved lemon
4 juniper berries
handful of walnuts
olive oil
pepper and salt
for the dressing:
2 T stewed, unsweetened rhubarb
1 t honey (omit if using sweetened rhubarb, replace if vegan)
2 T olive oil
1 T rice vinegar or lemon juice
salt
generous grinding of black pepper
Method
In a mortar and pestle, grind together the preserved lemon (or zest of half a lemon), juniper berries, olive oil, juice of 1/2 a lemon, pepper and salt, until smooth.
Peel cucumber/s, removing most of the green skins. Using a vegetable peeler or mandoline, thinly slice the cucumber and fennel into long strips. Place into a bowl. Using your hands, toss the strips with the lemon and juniper mix and then leave in the fridge for at least 15 minutes to marinate.
Chop fennel fronds finely.
Make the dressing, mixing together the ingredients in the same mortar and pestle, adding some water to get to a thick, drizzly consistency.
Place clean salad greens in your favourite bowl, top with the marinated cucumber, fennel and fennel fronds. Spoon over the rhubarb dressing and toss over a handful of walnuts.
The story behind the recipe…
This is one time where my preference for putting the recipe before the blurb may not make sense because you’re probably thinking: what the heck is gin salad and what is cucumber time and why is she putting rhubarb in a salad? So let me answer those questions.
We’re still in spring but in the strangeness of the times we live in, it is already morphing into summer. It is a high of 24 degrees today and I am sitting in a cotton summer dress writing this while sipping glass after glass of water with frozen passionfruit ice-cubes. I can remember it raining a grand total of once in the past two months. Everything is dry, hot, confused. We find ourselves gravitating towards the outside, craving picnics, the cool breeze, wanting food that can be pulled straight from the fridge, dips with raw vegetable crudités, cold bean or potato or pasta salads, green salads with a dressing that sloshes around in tupperware, food that can be packed into bike-bags and then cycled to the park, to be eaten under the shade of trees much older than we are, marvelling at how we don’t need to wear jackets.
Konkommertijd is a Dutch expression for the slow news days that come in the middle of summer, smack bang in the middle of cucumber season. Admittedly, cucumber time usually comes in July or August when a lot of people are away on holiday and the idea of a slow news season honestly seems laughable after the pummeling of the last few years. It may not be konkommertijd yet, but the seasons are already blurring into one another, we’re slowly slipping towards the languor of summer and there are new baby cucumbers at our local greengrocers that I can’t resist. So cucumbers are our vegetable this week.
I’ve always thought konkommertijd is the most evocative expression. It connotes G&Ts next to a pool with long cucumber strips, slices of lemon and heaps of ice; relaxing back with an avocado face mask and cucumber slices to cool your eyes; slow days in the garden weeding and then harvesting your cucumber plants. I also love a good idiom taken from the natural world, think butterfly effect, or dog days, or whale of a time. They seem so much more peaceful than the violent, masculine war analogies that so often dominate in the workplace (words like “guerilla marketing” or “crush the competition”, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere).
I was curious about the origins of konkommertijd. The term apparently also exists in English. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary with a 1700s reference to tailors, who may even at one time have been called cucumbers, and who would complain about the slow summer season when all the London gentry and politicians were away. One writer in the 1800s speculated that the phrase had been imported into English by German tailors seeking employment and bringing with them the phrase sauregurkenzeit (gherkin time). Similarly, etymologists think it probably came to Dutch from the German as well and examples in Dutch date back to at least 1787. Meanwhile, many other Northern European languages have the same idea, while the French call it la morte saison (which reminds me of how a still life in French is called une nature morte, a dead nature, not an alive one). A few Dutch websites claim there is, similarly, a thing called big gooseberry time in American English, but I’ve never heard of that, so please, take your gooseberry idioms with a grain of salt.
Anyway, a gin salad straight from the fridge seems perfect for a picnic on a warm, cucumber-time kind of day. Eat it with an (alcohol-free?) G&T. The salad takes its inspiration from the cool, refreshing flavours of gin: juniper berries, lemon and cucumber. With the addition of the rhubarb dressing, it is the beginning of summer on a plate. Rhubarb dressing is a revelation. A beautiful, slightly dusky, vibrant pink, it is tart and deeply flavourful with the pleasing sourness that you also get from tamarind or pomegranate molasses (so use these as substitutes).
Here’s to the beginning of konkommertijd, as we in Europe emerge (touch wood) out of coronatijd and into the summer. Cheers and thanks for reading this week.
Amelia.