Cucumber

The cucumber, Cucumis sativus, is an ancient cultivated vine of South Asian origin, grown across the old world for its cool, watery fruit. It earns a memorable place in the Hebrew Bible: in the Book of Numbers the Israelites in the desert weep for the food of Egypt, the cucumbers and melons, the leeks, onions and garlic they ate freely there, against the monotony of manna, one of scripture's sharpest images of the appetite that looks back to bondage. The English phrase cool as a cucumber records the plain fact that the fruit's interior stays cooler than the surrounding air.

The cucumber's later Roman history supplies a vivid anecdote: Pliny the Elder records that the emperor Tiberius was so fond of cucumbers that he had them grown for him every day of the year, forcing the vines under frames glazed with sheets of translucent mica, specularia, a primitive greenhouse built to defeat the seasons for a single ruler's appetite. The plant reached the Mediterranean from South Asia by way of Egypt well before Roman times, and its extremely high water content, some ninety-six per cent by weight, is the simple physical fact underlying both its reputation as a cooling food and the English idiom drawn from it. It has remained ever since one of the most widely cultivated vegetables on earth, eaten fresh, pickled and preserved across nearly every culture it has reached.

Culpeper placed the cucumber under the Moon, the ruler of cold and moist natures, an obvious reading of a fruit that is almost entirely cool water, and its old domestic use was as a cooling application to heated skin, given here as history, not as medical advice. In folk correspondence the cucumber accordingly carries lunar, cooling and fertility associations, the last from its abundant seed and rapid trailing growth. Like many kitchen plants its symbolic life is modest and grows directly from its evident qualities: watery coolness, quick abundance and a long place in the diet of the ancient Near East.

The cosmetic use of cucumber, its cool juice or a sliced round applied to soothe tired or puffy eyes and to calm sun-reddened skin, is one of the few pieces of old herbal practice to have survived essentially unchanged into modern commercial skincare, still marketed today on exactly the plant's original cooling reputation. Its abundant, easily counted seed also gave it a minor place in folk fertility symbolism, an association drawn, like much of its lore, directly from what can be seen by simply cutting the fruit open. The whole of the cucumber's modest magical standing rests on two plain facts, that it is almost entirely cool water and that it produces its seed in generous number, needing no invented history to explain either its place in the kitchen or its place in the correspondence tables.