Hello, and welcome to Saber Prediction of iHeartRadio. I'm Annie Reese.
And I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And today we have a classic for you about cucumbers.
Yes, Yes, and we did this one a little bit ago.
Yes. This was originally published in June of twenty eighteen.
Yes. And before I ask you if there was any reason it was on your mind, I have to say I often think of one thing when I think of this episode, and it's that our super producer Dylan Fagan really does not enjoy cucumbers, and due to circumstances, as it happens, he's the one editing this classic this week, as other super producer Andrew is having a nice vacation hopefully. And I when I saw this, I laugh, I laughed loud. Lord.
I picked it before Dylan, before I knew Dylan was signed on.
I'm sorry, Dylan, I'm sorry.
If it makes you feel better. They make me so gassy, so I cannot enjoy them either.
Oh, I love them. I've been I've been making bunch on caw yeah, and I've been using them in a I've been making spring rolls a lot lately.
Oh yeah, they taste lovely my guts cannot handle them.
That's a real shame. It is. So you both are cocktails. Oh I'm mad about it. Yeah, that's true. You're both in two different versions of a cucumber purgatory. Almost. You can't enjoy them because of your guts. Dylan can't enjoy them because he does not like them.
Yeah yeah, well, uh, what a lovely human to be stuck in a cucumber purgatory.
Yes, yes, indeed, But uh, they.
Were on my mind because you know, like we're getting into the warm months where like a nice refreshing cucumber, if you enjoy that sort of thing, would be so nice. And also like we are counting down to people who grow cucumbers having a lot of cucumbers on their hands.
Oh that's true, and that means like fresh pickles. Oh my rash. My mom makes this like summer relish with cucumbers. Oh yeah, you're right.
Friend of the show, Ramsey makes beautiful homemade homemade pickles.
Yeah they are so good. Wow.
Well, well, at least one of us here daydreams about cucumbers. I suppose we should let former Annie and Lauren take it away.
Hello, I'm welcome to foodstuff I'm Annie Reach.
And I'm more in vocal bomb, and today we're talking about another thing I shouldn't really eat.
Yes, we're making our bad habit of it's it's okay.
The list is long.
We're talking about cucumbers. Cucumbers and not pickles.
Not no, not pickles. Oh my goodness. We have a pickle guest WETI works.
Yes, and so a pickle episode is forthcoming, absolutely, but it is not this one, not today. No, today is the cucumber. And I wanted to include a quote, a quote of the episode right at the top from Samuel Johnson. A cucumber should be well sliced and dressed with pepper and vinegar, then thrown out. That's good for nothing.
Dang right, that is that is some strong words about a cucumber. You know, I don't feel that strongly about cucumber, and I.
Know I don't either, And I have to say I am someone who does have a lot of like theatrics in me and a lot of enemies as you mind. Be sure, Yeah, that's a lot even for me, like to put something, make a dish out of it and just be like so spiteful. Aha, I'm gonna throw you out at the end of this.
It's a lot, it is. But you know, I'm sure Sherry had his reasons.
He did, and we're gonna talk about them later. They're pretty excellent. Nevertheless, we're gonna we're gonna unpack all of that stuff. Yeah, starting with the cucumber. What is it.
Well, cucumbers are the fruit of a flowering vine. And yes, they're technically a fruit, not a vegetable, super technically or botanically. Rather, they are a berry. But yeah, there are many different kinds. But your basic cucumber is oblong, with a relatively thin, bitter, dark green skin, encasing like very pale green flesh, which is in turn encasing just a whole bunch of seeds.
The flesh is watery and crunchy, and the seeds are small and kind of soft and edible, and the whole thing tastes fresh and green and cool and a little bit savory or bitter.
Yeah, you're both.
The Latin name is Cecumus sativus, and they're fairly closely related to melons, pumpkins, cords, and squash.
Yes, and there are many, many, many types of cucumbers, oh yeah, including not actually including the scored in cucumber. I wanted to talk about it. I want to know what it is, but it's it's not a cucumber, so not within the purview of this episode.
It's like vaguely related. It looks sort of like a cucumber. Does it scort you when when it's ripe it injects its seeds? I mean, it's it's a vegetable, but when it gets very ripe, it just ejects its seeds like violently. So yeah, I.
Am going to have a good laugh about that later.
I you look like you're having a good laugh about that.
Right now, I'm struggling to contain myself the jokes I want to make. Oh yeah, but we must move on.
We yes, we must, sally forth, we must.
There are yes, many many types of cucumber, from the pickling cucumber like Curby or Liberty, to the Japanese and Mediterranean varieties.
Their skins range from smooth to bumpy to outright spiky, and can be yellow to green, to striped or speckled with both, and can be either completely edible or unpleasantly bitter and fibrous. On average, they can range from two to forty inches that's about five to one hundred centimeters in length, and weigh anything from two ounces to nine pounds. Nine pounds that's like fifty grams to four kilos. Wo. Yeah.
English cucumbers can grow up to two feet long a little underimeter and are seedless and therefore sometimes marketed as burpless. Apparently the seeds give some people. Guess we'll touch on that a little bit late.
Absolutely m hm.
Cucumbers typically are categorized in one of two ways, slicing or pickling. Slicing cucumber are eaten straight from the garden or wherever you get your cucumbers from, and generally have smooth, spine free skin and can range in length from four to twelve inches. Pickling cucumbers, on the other hand, are smaller, like one to five inches, and their skin is bumpier and or spinier.
Oh. One thing in addition to squirting cucumbers that is not technically a type of cucumber is a gurkin. Oh really, and okay, this is about to get what I consider completely unnecessarily complicated. Botanically speaking, Gurkins are other fruits of viny plants in the Cucurba tasi family, the same as cucumber, and they resemble cucumbers in flavor or appearance, for example, the cucumus and guria, the West Indian gurkin, and the
mellow Thria scabra, the Mexican sour girkin. That's botanically. Culturally speaking, gurkin is either a botanical girkin that has been pickled, or a small pickled cucumber of any kind. Some people just pickle a cucumber and call it a girkin because they resemble at things that are gurkins, and gurkins resemble cucumbers anyway.
So I think that's why I've been confused.
I it's confusing, It really is, it really is. So that's fine, right.
Etymology wise, the origins of the name is fairly straightforward, from the Latin cucumberan. Then the old French maybe or maybe not, took that and turned it into cucumbra, and then that jumped to English because it's pretty close cucumbra. Or perhaps it straight up came from y Cliff's first English translation of the Bible, in which the cucumber gets name checked more than once, huh. Or it could have been both, but generally that's a that's a simpler story than we're normally telling.
Oh, absolutely right. Yes, cucumbers are an annual plant, meaning that you have to plant them anew each growing season from seeds or transplants, and they will grow flour fruit and then die off. Yeah. Grow either bush like along the ground or can be trained up trellises or other standing objects, fences, whatever you want. And the plants generally have both male and female flowers, but some have been cultivated to have a majority of one or the other.
Either way, they don't self pollinate or wind pollinate because they're pretty sticky. You need insects, probably honeybees to do that for you, Our good old friend, the honeybe I know. In big agriculture, cucumbers are harvested mechanically, like the whole plant is just pulled up and sent for sorting. They're fairly delicate, and it's considered best to hand pluck them
from their vines. The ones with thin skins come shrink wrapped in order to prevent water loss along the way, which is why if you've seen an English cucumber shrink wrapped, Oh, there you go. They don't want it to otherwise it would dehydrate like a sponge.
Tidal idea, the thin skinned cucumber. Ooh, all right, I like it. This is part of my process, everybody. If we're looking at nutrition, I've often heard of cucumber referred to as a quote negative calorie food, meaning the calories you expend on digesting it are more than the calories you get from eating it. Yeah, probably not, didn't find anything to back it up, but a half cup will run you about eight calories and they are ninety five ninety six percent water.
Side note here, there are no scientifically rigorous studies that prove that negative calorie foods are an actual thing. I mean, like, throughout the day, about five to ten percent of your energy goes into digesting foods. But eating negative calori foods isn't going to give you enough nutrients to like live on, right, So I mean, you know, if you like them, then eat them, and we could all use more vegetables and fibers things in our diets. But please, please please ignore
people who try to sell you on like negative calorie eating. Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, if you're going to go negative calorie, that should be done through a combination of diet and exercise. Don't just do it through food. No, probably consult a doctor.
Yes, always. We are not medical professionals. Nope, nope, nope. But whatever the case, they are healthy. Yeah. They have potassium and vitamins AB six C and K fall eight, magnesium, siamine, phosphorus, copper, and manganese. I did read somewhere that it was kind of like a judgy It was a weird judgy statement, like the cucumber is healthy, but it's not that healthy.
It's like, okay. It was strange in the context of what it was written in because it wasn't just like some comment that nobody yeah, like no blowjo or whatever made It was in an article about cucumbers. I thought it was interesting. In twenty ten, we produced fifty seven
point five million tons of cucumber around the world. As of two thousand and five, China accounted for sixty percent of that, followed by Turkey, Russia, Iran, and the US the largest cucumber well, last I checked, I'm not regularly checking these things. The last I checked, it was one hundred and sixty four pounds or what are about seventy four kilos and sixty seven inches long or one hundred and seventy centimeters.
That that cucumber is like way bigger than me.
Oh, that's a weird thought. That's a weird.
Thought, like I could comfortably fit inside that cucumber.
Oh, I know, you'd be so cool, cool as a cucumber. Perhaps, I keep thinking of pickle Rick. Oh yeah, but if he would, if he had been that size, he would be like a human size.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's this is going to come back later.
Oh absolutely, absolutely right.
Okay, but Rick, aside for the current moment or the current moment, we're going to get into the history of the cucumber. But first we're going to get into a quick word from our sponsor.
Back, thank you sponsor. The cucumber got its start in ancient Asia, probably around India and the Himalayas, where it had been cultivated for at least three thousand years. Early cucumbers produced more cucurbitisens than most of our modern varieties. And this is a bitter compound that the cucumber makes to keep those pested away. Yeah.
Yeah, it doesn't taste good, taste like toxic.
Stay back, stay back, don't eat me. Please more on that. Yes, cucumber's got to mention in the legend of Gilgamesh, and was on the product list of the ancient er in the Sumea region of Mesopotamia. As we said at the top of the show, the Bible brings up the cucumber as one of the foods freely available to the slaves in Egypt. Quote. We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers, and the melons, and
the leaks, and the onions and the garlic. There are even stories of making a weak liqueur drink from cucumber in the early days by cutting a hole in the fruit, stirring up the insides until they were all liquidy, plugging up the hole, and then bearing the cucumber for a couple of days. I mean, if anybody wants to give it a shot, let us know how I go.
Oh goodness, don't take our advice.
No never. According to some sources, the peoples of southeastern Europe in areas like Turkey and Bulgaria are producing cumber around the same time as well. Whatever the case, from India, the cucumber made the journey most likely with the Romans to Europe. Ancient Romans were big fans of the crop our old pal Pliny the Elder observed that they were a popular choice for Emperor Tiberius, who was never without them.
He loved them so much that they were grown throughout the year using artificial methods similar to a greenhouse, to make sure that he was never ever minus a cucumber. If he wanted a cucumber, he could get his hands on one. Roman gardeners would plant them in wooden carts so they could be wheeled out in the sun during the day and moved inside during the cold winter months. They were kept in frames or cucumber houses. They had pineapple houses, cucumber houses.
Yeah, I mean they're pretty delicate, like they do best in like kind of warm temperatures. But if they drop blow like fifty, they're ruined. If they go too high, they're ruined.
My little heart is like poor cucumbers, poor delicate cucumbers. Plenty of descriptions of these cucumbers more closely resemble that of wild cucumbers than what we cultivate these days. They were quite small, and of course they were used for medicinal purposes, everything from scorpion bites to improved eyesight to the medicinally tangential I guess scaring away of mice. Okay, yeah, women wanting to get pregnant would wear them strung about their waist. I got a very big laugh out of
that at my desk. Some midwives would carry them too, and they would toss the cucumber once the child in question was born. Oh okay, I'm kind of curious. How many people do you think we're getting stung by scorpions right in this time, because it's come up more than once.
That a food is good for like scorpions stings.
Yeah, or snake bites.
Oh, so I think they're just more serious than than they are now.
Like I suppose that's true. I mean a scorpion sting hurts.
Or some of them are deadly.
I think that's true. Just just amusings than I have about previous times.
And no insecticides. Yeah, there are many reasons why the past is a terrible time to have lived, but it's I mean, like hats are basically the only good thing we could bring back.
Hats.
Oh man.
I you know the first time I was stung by a scorpion, I was four and I put I put my my foot my shoe. Yeah, you always check your shoes oh, I learned a lesson. I feel like that should be a proverb. Always check your shoes. Always check shoes. Scorpion may lurk inside.
There's a T shirt.
Anyway, Back to the cucumber. As we move into the Middle Ages, cucumber first appeared in written records in France in the ninth century CE, when Charlemagne decreed that they'd be grown in his garden. Some writings from this period suggest that cucumbers were introduced to England in the thirteen hundreds, lost and then reintroduced two and a half centuries later.
This is because the English had a word for cucumber translated literally to earth apple as far back as ten sixty sixtye, which suggests that at least somebody had seen them, or maybe they got the idea from the Bible. Mysteries of history yep. Catherine of Aragon is said to have liked cucumbers and her salads. I do too. Catherine of Aragon and fourteen ninety four Columbus. During Columbus again brought them over to Haiti. When French explorer Jacques Cartier arrived
in Montreal, he found quote very great cucumbers. But historians think he was probably mistaken, given that they were such a new crop in the New World at the time, the time being fifteen thirty five. In fifteen thirty nine, De Soto wrote that the cucumbers he found in Florida
were superior to the ones found in Spain. European colonialism introduced them to Africa, too, and as more and more trade took place between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the cucumber was adopted as a crop in the New World, particularly with the tribes of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Several books penned in the sixteen hundreds described cucumbers or cowcumbers.
Cucumbers as they were frequently called at the time.
Yeah, oh yeah, growing in New England colonies. And I hope that can you indulge me, Lauren and listeners that if I found an expert, I'd like to read from a sixteen hundred book how to grow them in the Americas, and the double entendres just oh please, please, do, thank you. Cucumbers must be grown to an enormous length. Everybody wants to have his fruit larger than his name. And if it is so long that no dish can be found
to hold it, so much the better. But is there any common sense in this of what use are these long fruits except to make people stare? Are they better bearers? Better cedars? Quite the contrary, they are simply longer, too coarse to suit a cultivated taste.
Oh, that's that is? That is a lot.
It is, isn't it? It goes on And I like stopped myself from reading the entire thing because it continues.
I'm glad that we're both twelve.
That's that's good. I hope that.
I hope that you listeners out there are also twelve and enjoying that.
I hope.
So.
Physicians continued espousing the health benefits of cucumbers, and because of its high water content and retentativeness, the retentative retentativeness of the water, that's fun to say, cucumbers were thought to never lose their cool and that's a quote. Because of this, patients with fevers may be treated by a laying on a bed of sliced cucumbers in order to become as cool as a cucumber.
That usage popped up around the seventeen thirties.
Right, we're still using it. Today.
Right, Oh, it's great.
Yes. Eating cucumbers three times daily was also believed to be a cure for pimples and a reddish nose. Yeah. The inside of a cucumber can be as much as twenty degrees fahrenheit less than the outside.
And that's like out in a sunny field.
Yeah, yeah, that's pretty impressive. And yeah, this is why cucumbers are placed over the eyes at places like Spas. For the coolness factor in actual temperature, that's probably cool. Cool man, You probably don't look cool at all.
No, not really. I mean it's but you're comfortable. It depends on your definition.
That's true. That's true, Lauren. However, the cucumbers public reputation soon fell to the wayside in the late sixteen hundreds, thanks in part to a growing distaste and prejudice against eating raw fruits and vegetables. This prejudice got its roots in several articles appearing in health publications claiming that uncooked produce led to disease, was little better than trash, possibly poisonous,
and should not be fed to children. One article signaled out the cucumber inspecific as a crop quote fit only for cows.
Well maybe that's where that whole cowcumber thing comes from.
That's what some historians think. A sixteen sixty three diary had this entry on the matter. This day, Sir W. Batton tells me that mister Newhouse is dead of eating cowcumbers, of which the other day I heard of another. I think cucumber's. Cucumber's poor reputation hung around for quite a while until the nineteenth century. A company that comes up a lot on this show was in part to thank for the good cucumber pr and restoration of its image, Heines.
Heines started selling pickles in eighteen seventy six. Other companies followed soon after, and people got on board with the cucumber again.
Yeah.
Yeah. During his time making their rounds through Asia, Minor Frederick Hasselquist stumbled upon the Egyptian hairy cucumber, which he described as quote queen of cucumbers, refreshing, sweet, solid, and wholesome in that they quote still form a great part of the food of the lower class people in Egypt, serving them for meat, drink, and physic interesting. By eighteen o six, there were at least eight varieties of cucumbers growing in colonial America.
And they are a popular garden element to this day.
They are. I think in twenty fourteen it was named the Year of the Cucumber, right, yeah, and it is one of the top five fruits. I always want to say.
Vegetables, but fruit technically fruit.
Yes, grown in American gardens, So it's come a long way from the cowcumber.
Although I love that name, I would. I don't know. I feel like there's marketing there to be harnessed.
I do too, for sure. Hmm, get on that marketers.
Yeah, something else to be possibly harnessed to some of its medicinal powers, which are related to its burpie powers.
It's burpie powers, yeah.
Yes, indeed, and more on that after one more quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Thank you sponsor, Yes.
Thank you. So the burping power of cucumbers, it's true, it's true. Yes, cucumbers do make some people burp.
Some people.
Yeah, you know, if you're inclined to burp, you might burp. If you're not, there's been no real scientific studies.
I find that hard to believe.
But there is a group of compounds in cucumbers and other related plants called cucurbiticens, which Annie mentioned earlier, and they provide some of those bitter flavor notes in cucumbers and also make some people burp. Yeah.
A listener email in about this forever ago, and I think it was a very short email and it just said, do cucumbers actually make you burp? Can you look into this? And I was like, that can't be true. I've never really heard of that. But here's a quote I've found from the I think it's the Missouri University of Missouri. Non birthless types can be made a bit more socially acceptable by cutting off about one inch of the stem end and peeling the skin off the fruit.
And that's true. Most of the cucumb meiticines in cucumbers are concentrated in the skin and in that tail end or that that stem end of the cucumber. But they're not just in there for like comedy effects. In nature, they do help ward off pests. Many creatures avoid better flavors because many better flavors are toxic. Yeah, which means that psychologists say that if you really like better flavors, there's something a little bit off about you.
What's your favorite type of flavor Lauren Bitter. Ohh okay, cool.
That mild toxicity may cause some people to burp after eating cucumber, but it could actually be a bonus in the long run. Cucre bitisins may have anti tumor properties. Oh really Yeah, because apparently they're toxic to tumors too.
Makes sense.
Yeah, and more more research needs to be done on that one.
Yeah, okay, but I got another question. Yeah, why do they smell gross to some people?
This is something I'd never heard of me either, Like I, like I have have lots of experience with the with the great debate of whether cilantro is delicious or tastes like soap. Yeah, and that's a genetic thing, it is. This is also a genetic thing. The compound phenyl thio carbamide or PTC, which is a much nicer thing to say out loud, either tastes like super bitter or basically like nothing at all, depending on your per genetic makeup.
The specific gene that creates the physical shape of the taste receptors to either be able to detect this or not, or something a little bit in between, was identified in two thousand and three. Oh wow, Yeah, okay, okay, okay, but.
Why are cats so dang scared of cucumbers?
All right? This is a matter of some debate, but okay, either A cats think their snakes at first, okay, oh good guys, sure? Or B if you plunked basically anything unexpected down behind a cat, especially when it's just been eating, it's going to be startled.
Huh.
I mean like if someone quietly snuck behind you while you were eating dinner and left an object there that's about half as tall as you and as thick as your leg, what would you do when you got up and turned around.
Well, I'm easily startled, But okay, this is giving me an idea because there's a guy out where I'm very easily startled.
Is I basically cannot approach her desk without startling her? Yeah, which I constantly feel bad about but also giggle about a little bit.
Yeah, there's a like people can slowly approach with their hands up in like a surrender I mean no harm position, and I will like jump back into the wall.
That's literally what I usually do.
Yeah, but there's a guy at work who likes to prank me. He likes to scare me, he likes to startle me. He sits, he stands. We have standing desks across from me. Uh, Chandler, Chandler. And I think I'm going to just put a cucumber behind him because it's weird. It won't scare him, it's weird.
See, I was picturing as I was writing this, I was picturing Pickle Rick. I was like, what if like an enlarged version of Pickle Rick was just standing behind you.
Oh, that would scare me.
Oh yeah, when you got done eating, I'd be real scared.
Pickle Rick is terrifying.
I love Rick and Morty. I never want to meet Rick, especially not in pickle format.
No fun fact, I would say that was the most popular costume Dragonconn last year.
Oh goodness, yeah, I saw a really good one.
Pickle Rick's abound.
But anyway, cats and cucumbers don't. Don't do that to your cat man. Don't do things to your pets to startle them on purpose. It's impolite. I mean, and I know that cats don't have a concept of rudeness. Actually they do. They're heck and rude, they totally do. But but they don't understand the humor in the situation. And it's just stressing them out. Be nice to your pets.
Yeah, always be nice to your pets. Chandler, however, has it coming.
Chandler is way less innocent than a cat.
So I can't wait to do this. I'm very excited. We'll need to film it, Okay, yes, And that brings us to the end of this classic episode. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it back. And oh, if you have recipes, pickle recipes, whatever, please let us know.
Oh yeah, yeah, well and let Annie now they're they're they're useless to me.
Don't don't let lord know. This will be our our secret. There you go.
I do have one, uh correction kind of so all right. So in the beginning of this episode, uh, we talked about extraordinarily large cucumbers and uh, I'm not sure where your source on the biggest cucumber, which which was the University of Missouri Environment and Garden magazine. I'm not sure where they got their numbers, but they were much larger than what I could find. Because in preparation to do this classic, I was like, I should see if someone
has grown a bigger cucumber. This is obviously my journalistic duty, but I couldn't find anything even close to that size. So, according to Guinness, which is not to be fair, the be all end all of records, but I couldn't find competing records. There are separate categories for or longest cucumber and heaviest cucumber. The record for the longest was set in twenty twenty two by a man in the UK.
It measured three feet eight inches or one hundred and thirteen centimeters, and the record for the heaviest was set in twenty twenty three, also in the UK, and it weighed twenty nine pounds eight ounces or thirteen point four kilos, so smaller than the numbers originally reported, but still really impressive.
Well, I'm always so interested in these records because sometimes I wonder if clearly people purposely set out to do them. Well, the people, I'm wondering if they're just sitting on a record and they don't know, Oh sure, who knows what world of records were missing out on?
Yeah, I think with a lot of these it is a very purposeful. Yes, you know, I've read about the regimen of watering and feeding that people put these vegetables through.
It's like a montage of training montage. I do have to say, if anyone has any insight to this, I've actually seen a horror movie about its surprise surprise. I bought a pumpkin in October. I didn't carve it because I was sad. It looks great. It looks like I bought it yesterday. It's a huge conversation piece every time someone comes over there.
Like where did you get a pumpkin?
It is April, and I'm like, oh, no, I bought that. Yeah, so that's fun. If anyone has any thoughts.
That I last year, I had one last like into the summer, and then it very suddenly kind of.
That's what I'm worried about. I keep like checking it for good. I didn't. I did not. If we talked about that in our pumpkin our recent pumpkin short about how you should properly dispose of pumpkins if you can, and so I'm trying to make I'm trying to do it correctly, but also it's doing well anyway, Listeners, if you have grown any of an interesting an interesting crop of note, let us know, and yeah, any recipes send my way. Yes, you can email us at Hello at savorpod dot com.
We are also on social media. You can find us on Blue Sky and Instagram at saver pod and we do hope to hear from you. Savor is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan Fae again and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots of more good things are coming your way