By Joel Denker
“Raw cucumber makes the churchyards prosperous.” As this sixteenth century English saying suggests, the cucumber once raised the specter of death. For others, it was a symbol of fertility that brought hope and elation. As the cucumber made its way from its birthplace in the East to the West, it was sometimes considered auspicious, sometimes frightening.
Unlike its kin, the pumpkin and squash, the cucumber is a native of the Old World, not the New. This gourd descends from a wild, unappetizing plant that grew in the moist foothills of the Himalayas. The original was small—the size of a golf ball—bitter, and spiny. Most likely domesticated in Northern India, this scrawny cucumber was gradually transformed into a robust fruit with a more pleasing flavor. Varieties of different shapes, sizes, and colors were bred.
The sakusha, or “pleasant food,” as it was known in the ancient Sanskrit language, was invested with mythic power. Indians were impressed by its “exuberance of reproductive power” and “wealth of seed,” as food historian Victor Hehn put it. In one Indian tale, Sumati, the wife of King Sagara, the Sea God, gives birth to 60,000 sons who burst forth from a cucumber shell. The first son, Ikshavaku, a cucumber, bore a son, who climbed to heaven on his own vine.
The people of the Biblical Near East also had a strong attachment to the prolific fruit. Memories of the cool, thirst-quenching cucumber burned in the hearts of the Israelites in their exile in the desert. Moses was sad that he had forgotten to bring cucumber seeds with him. “We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers and the melons, and the leeks, Now our throats are parched,” they pined (Numbers 11:5). (In the ancient sources, some think, “cucumber” may have actually referred to a melon that resembled its close relative.)
The plant was widely grown in ancient Egypt, where it fed both the Israelites and the country’s masses. The Pharaohs gave the water-rich gourds to their slaves, who were laboring in ferociously hot temperatures, to slake their thirst.
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To learn more about cucumbers, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
