conquering cucumbers
It’s Friday, I’m on vacation for the next week, and I made a doozie of a focaccia yesterday. All is right in my world, and I hope yours too.
Tuesday night, I ate cucumber. The light in the restaurant was dim, and whenever I speared something green in my shrimp aguachile, I told myself it was avocado. Some bites, it was. Others, I wasn’t so lucky.
As someone who consumed little besides mashed potatoes, chicken fingers, Pepperidge Farm white bread and chocolate chips for most of her first decade of life, I’m proud of my palate’s evolution. At this point, I can count the things I don’t like on one hand: beets, celery, black licorice and, of course, cucumber.
The first three feel insurmountable. I can’t eat a beet and not taste dirt, I refuse to get past the texture of celery, and my taste buds register black licorice as something akin to years-old soap. If you like these sensations, I envy you. It is easier to like everything than it is to like everything minus four, especially if several of the four things you can’t stomach tend to dot restaurant menus and buffets at family holidays. (Why is there celery in stuffing? I’ll ask this question until I die and still not get a good enough answer.)
But back to cucumber. It pops up too often in too many things I love — see: sushi, gin cocktails, ceviche — for me to not have an open mind, which I swear I do. The taste is one thing; there’s something about a cucumber’s not-sweet, not-salty, not-sour, not-bitter, somehow-not-tasteless vibe that throws me. But I’m making progress toward getting over that. The real problem is the burping.
I didn’t know until recently that this is actually a relatively common cuke side-effect. It’s the result of a chemical compound called cucurbitacin, which is found in cucumbers and is known to upset weak stomachs, which in turn upsets me. I’ve eaten pints of ice cream in one sitting, tongue-melting-hot peppers and goose jerky and venison sausage. I’ve sucked who knows how many hundred crawfish hepatopancreases right out of their little reddish heads. My stomach is the Hulk Hogan of stomachs, and this stupid green vegetable is what gets me? It’s mortifying.
I’m really not sure if it’s the taste or the shame that’s at the root of my cucumber aversion. Either way, I used to lie at sushi bars and tell them I was allergic. I’d make sure to sip my Pimm’s cup from anywhere on the rim other than the spot where I’d just yanked an offending slice. But cucumber, I fear, is just too ingrained in the fabric of dining. At a prix fixe dinner, it’s never listed on menus as a garnish, and then it lurks in a salsa atop a perfectly cooked piece of beef or skulks under a buttery seared scallop. And I’m not not going to eat these cucumber-filled Trojan horses, so at some point in the recent past, I resolved to not mind them, burps and all.
Amazingly, I’m making progress. I did nothing uncouth while snacking on aguachile this week, and even if I would’ve preferred to trade every single cucumber for more avocado, I understand why they’re there, that the crunch and burst of (confusing) flavor is supposed to complement everything around them.
Maybe my stomach is building up a tolerance. Maybe my brain is. Either way, there’s something mind-blowing about the fact that there are essentially no limits to our abilities to grow as eaters, to learn about food and how to love it — or at least to tolerate it enough to not let it get in the way of a good meal. I will never get taller, I will never be particularly strong, I will never learn how to sing at the right pitch, and I will never not default to talking twice as fast as I should. But I can conquer cucumbers. And that’s not nothing.
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