Cucumber

The cucumber is a creeping vine of the gourd family, grown as an annual, which roots in the ground and climbs trellises and other supports by thin spiralling tendrils. It bears long, roughly cylindrical fruits, about 95 per cent water, that botanists class as a kind of berry with a rind and cooks treat as a vegetable. Its first home was southern and eastern Asia, from India and Nepal to southern China and northern Thailand, and it was domesticated in India from a wild variety at least three thousand years ago. Pliny reports that the Emperor Tiberius had it at table every day, summer and winter, raised in frames on wheels that could be rolled into the sun; Charlemagne had it grown in his gardens, and the Spanish carried it to the Americas in 1494. Growers now sort it into slicing, pickling and seedless kinds, and gherkins are small cucumbers picked for pickling. Northcote, writing in 1903, records cucumber and cowslip made into a wash to brighten the complexion, and Kynes's herbal still recommends cucumber slices for puffy eyes. Cunningham gives it to the Moon and to water, with the powers of chastity, healing and fertility: eaten, the fruit is said to hinder lust.