By A lazy August week. The kind of week where the heat sits on Long Island like a cat on a lap — heavy, immovable, generating its own warmth regardless of whether you want it. I have surrendered to the heat. I cook cold things. I write about cold things. I have become a woman of gazpacho and iced tea and the particular pleasure of eating dinner on the back porch where the evening breeze from the ocean makes the temperature almost bearable.
Marvin is in the garden every morning, before the heat arrives, tending his tomatoes with the devotion of a man whose second career has turned out to be more satisfying than his first. He weeds. He waters. He talks to the plants, which he will deny if asked, but I have heard him from the kitchen window, and the conversations are surprisingly substantive. He tells the tomatoes about the Mets. He tells them about the weather. He tells them, I suspect, about me, because sometimes I catch him looking at me through the kitchen window with an expression that suggests he has just told a tomato something nice about his wife and the tomato agreed.
I made a cold cucumber soup this week — yogurt, cucumber, dill, garlic, lemon — a soup that requires no cooking, only chopping and blending and the patience to let it chill for two hours. This is the opposite of brisket, the anti-brisket, the soup you make when the oven is your enemy and the refrigerator is your friend. Sylvia did not make cold cucumber soup. Sylvia was suspicious of cold soups generally, the way she was suspicious of anything that deviated from the Ashkenazi canon. But Miriam makes a version of this in Tel Aviv, with mint instead of dill, and I have adapted it, and the adaptation is not betrayal, it is evolution, and the soup is excellent, and Sylvia can haunt me about it if she likes.
I wrote about summer reading on the blog — about the books I reread every summer and the way they change as I change. I reread Mrs. Dalloway this August and found in it something I never noticed before: food. The dinner party. The preparation. The way Woolf writes about a woman choosing flowers and planning a menu as if these are acts of creation, which they are. Mrs. Dalloway in a kitchen is my mother in a kitchen is every woman who ever stood at a counter and decided what to make for dinner and understood that the decision was not trivial but essential: you are choosing what to feed the people you love. The choice is a poem.
The cucumber soup is in the refrigerator. The garden is green. The August continues. The books wait. The kitchen cools. Everything is summer.
If the soup is what I made for myself — the private, refrigerator-cold pleasure of a bowl eaten alone at the kitchen counter while Marvin talked to his tomatoes — then this cucumber salad is what I make when someone else is coming to the table. It has the same spirit: no heat, no oven, no surrender to August on its own terms. Crisp cucumber, a clean bright dressing, something cool and honest on a plate. It is the kind of recipe Miriam would approve of, and possibly even Sylvia, if she were in a generous mood, which she sometimes was.
Cucumber Salad
Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes (includes brief chill) | Servings: 4
Ingredients
- 2 large English cucumbers, thinly sliced
- 1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced
- 1/4 cup fresh dill, roughly chopped
- 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
- 1 clove garlic, finely minced (optional)
Instructions
- Prep the cucumbers. Thinly slice the cucumbers (a mandoline works well here, but a sharp knife is fine). If your cucumbers have thick skins, peel them first; English cucumbers can go in as-is.
- Salt and rest. Place cucumber slices in a colander, sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon salt, and toss gently. Let sit for 10 minutes to draw out excess water, then pat dry with a clean towel. This keeps the salad from turning watery.
- Make the dressing. In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, olive oil, sugar, garlic (if using), and black pepper until the sugar dissolves.
- Combine. Add the cucumbers, red onion, and fresh dill to the bowl. Toss well to coat everything in the dressing. Taste and adjust salt as needed.
- Chill briefly. Let the salad sit in the refrigerator for at least 15 minutes before serving — this allows the flavors to settle and the cucumbers to absorb the dressing. It keeps well for up to 2 days, though it’s best the day it’s made.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 75 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 5g | Carbs: 7g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 295mg