Cucumber Punch — The Quiet Reward After Two Days at the Stove

The final preserving push of the season — the apple jelly from the first pressing, the late-season tomatoes into chutney rather than sauce, the last of the cucumbers into a bread-and-butter pickle that is different from the dill and serves different purposes through the winter. I have been at the stove for most of two days and the shelf in the back room is as full as it will get before winter comes and I start eating into it. The inventory at peak: thirty-four quarts tomato sauce, twenty-four jars rhubarb-strawberry jam, twelve jars apple jelly, eight jars bread-and-butter pickle, eight jars dill pickle, six jars apple butter, four quarts tomato chutney. Plus the pantry staples and the root cellar squash that will go in next month. The house is prepared.

The chutney is a recipe I developed about fifteen years ago for the late-season tomatoes that are not quite ripe enough for sauce — green and orange and barely pink fruit that has been picked before frost and will not improve further on the vine. These tomatoes have enough acidity and the chutney adds brown sugar and cider vinegar and mustard seed and raisins and onion in a long slow reduction that transforms the barely-ripe fruit into something with genuine complexity. The bread-and-butter version of this chutney goes with the December cheese plates, the August cheese plates, the sandwiches made from leftovers every November. It is a utility recipe that earns its place.

Carol drove down for a day Saturday, partly to help with the chutney pressing — two people processing tomatoes is significantly faster than one — and partly to celebrate the state fair ribbon in person, which we had not had a chance to do. She brought the jar that won, the identical formula to what she will make from now on, and we ate it on sourdough toast at the kitchen table and talked about what she had figured out that won it. The altitude adjustment. The apple blend. The cook time with the cold plate test. She had applied the same systematic attention to apple butter that she brings to everything she does well. Helen used to say Carol was the more organized of the two of them and that she envied it. I told Carol that and she went quiet for a moment and then said: Helen was more intuitive. I said: yes, and now you have both. She thought about that and did not disagree.

After two days at the stove and every cucumber I could get my hands on already put up as bread-and-butter or dill, I was left with a small pile of the last ones — too few for another batch, too good to waste. Carol had gone home, the shelf in the back room was as full as it would get, and I was tired in the particular way that comes from finishing something large. I made this cucumber punch that evening, cold and bright and gone in about twenty minutes, and it felt exactly right: the cucumbers that did not go into jars becoming something immediate and perishable, a small counterweight to all those sealed lids.

Cucumber Punch

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 15 min (plus 1 hour chilling) | Servings: 8

Ingredients

• 2 large cucumbers, peeled, seeded, and roughly chopped
• 1 cup cold water
• 1/3 cup fresh lime juice (about 3–4 limes)
• 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2 lemons)
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar, or to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
• 2 cups ginger ale or sparkling water, chilled
• 1 cup lemonade or white grape juice, chilled
• Ice, for serving
• Thin cucumber slices and fresh mint, for garnish

Instructions

1. Blend the cucumber base. Combine chopped cucumber and 1 cup cold water in a blender. Blend on high until completely smooth, about 60 seconds.
2. Strain. Pour the blended cucumber through a fine-mesh strainer into a large pitcher, pressing the solids with a spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard the pulp.
3. Add citrus and sweetener. Stir in the lime juice, lemon juice, sugar, and salt until the sugar fully dissolves. Taste and adjust sweetness or tartness as needed.
4. Chill. Refrigerate the cucumber base for at least 1 hour until thoroughly cold.
5. Finish and serve. Just before serving, stir in the chilled ginger ale and lemonade. Fill glasses with ice, pour the punch over, and garnish with thin cucumber rounds and a sprig of fresh mint.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 65 | Protein: 0g | Fat: 0g | Carbs: 17g | Fiber: 0g | Sodium: 75mg