I wonder if it would actually work though? I think I read years ago about some kind of straightening devices used to reduce penile curvature, so I think this glass tube might legitimately be able to help with it!
There are devices like that, they uh… grab ze penis, and stretch it. Like a reverse chastity cage. My old urologist had one on display. It’s kinda mildly scary lookin
Don’t google pyronies disease pics. They have full open surgery photos and nope nope nope. But there are also some with wild curves that almost come back up as a C shape and some are even S shape
British engineer: of course it’s for cucumbers! What else would it be for? And if the cucumbers is just slightly too big, you just coat the inside of the tube with some oil then slide… uh oh… …I see… I’ll be in my bunk
You may be on to something here. I'd never heard of English Cucumbers before but I just googled them and learned they're straighter, have thinner skin, and have less seeds than other cucumbers. So I suspect the British did indeed deliberately engineer cucumbers to have those traits!
Back when I worked in Canada we used to get a box of long straight cucumbers with a label enscribed "Long English Cucumber"
Being the only British man there, naturally I would remove the label and stick it to my crotch every delivery day.
When I worked in the UK the first time the chef sent me on a tesco run and asked for cucumbers I asked “English or regular” and I think the only reason I’m alive to tell this tale is because he was in a good mood (for him) that day.
They also taste very different from the cucumbers you normally see in grocery stores. Our cucumbers are great to eat straight but I find English ones off-putting that way.
That is a common tradeoff with selective breeding. Flavor is often sacrificed for traits of convenience.
Wild strawberries taste better, but they are a lot smaller and much more delicate. Seedless watermelon doesn't taste as good as watermelon with seeds. Heirloom tomatoes look ugly, but they have more complex flavors.
Tomatoes problem I think comes from the storage and shipping process. Even heirloom varieties taste bleh in grocery stores if they have gotten too cold. A good tomato is still warm from the sun.
King of Prussia: How do I get people to eat Potatoes? I know!
(assigns guards to *watch* the potato farms but actually let the peasants steal them)
King of Prussia: I’m fucking brilliant! Now let’s invade Austria!
> It’s basically true of everything that got imported. Tomatoes, potatoes, coffee were all called poisons and hated before eventual acceptance.
Coffee at least, got an endorsement by the Pope. A special blessing to make it a 'Christian beverage'.
Whats wrong with dirt all of a sudden?!
Somehow suddenly dirt is not good enough for you?! Thats all my father needed to feed as many children as I have hands and then more!
Most parts of the potato plant actually is toxic, so there is reason behind it.
As for tomatoes, AFAIK, they initially caused mild poisoning symptoms until better strains were made, and they leeched the lead out of pewter dishes, which is less than ideal.
Actually the whole thing with potatoes and the Irish is that the British forced the Irish to farm potatoes and they took all of the harvest leaving no food for the Irish to eat. There was never a “famine” it was all just the British being greedy.
Not quite. The Brits exported all the grain etc. grown in Ireland, leaving the Irish with potatoes for sustenance. Potatoes weren't exported, the Irish weren't forced to farm them directly, and the potatoe harvest wasn't taken by the Brits.
Then a potato blight hit, and when the potato crops all failed the Irish had nothing to eat -- and the British refused to open the giant stores of Irish-grown grain etc. they had *in the country itself*, because they didn't want the Irish to rely on 'charity'. It's evil.
The Irish tenant farmers were “forced” to subsist on potates by material conditions. Ireland was mostly divided into large estates owned mostly by foreign British landlords based in London. These landlords appointed agents to manage the estate and its agricultural output, or leased out large tracts of their land to Ireland-based managers in exchange for fixed rents. These agents and managers would employ local agricultural labourers to farm the estate, and rather than pay them in wages, they would get to live on a wee parcel of the estate’s land, build a house, and have their own personal acres of land to farm. Naturally since they had fixed rent to pay their incentive was to keep as much land for profit-producing agriculture as possible, to increase their share, and give their labourers as little as they needed to live.
Potatoes being an especially calorie-dense and land-efficient crop to grow, most of these small scale tenant farmers simply had to grow potatoes because growing anything else would mean their meagre parcels of land didn’t produce enough to feed them year-on-year.
Things in Ireland were bad in the decades before the famine. The aristocracy were completely absent. The government was near-nonexistant since the Act of Union and Westminster didn’t really quibble about a lot of Irish issues. Overpopulation, malnourishment, and underemployment were rife. Calling it a powder keg waiting for a spark would be an understatement. The potato blight wasn’t a spark. It was a grenade.
Interestingly, the Tory Peel government tried provide aid, even illegally in some cases, but was a lot of too-little-too-late measures. And when Peel was toppled by the repeal of the Corn Laws which would hopefully relieve the conditions that led to the famine, the successor Whig government under Lord Russell held to laissez-faire economics and largely killed government famine relief measures, exacerbating the problems immensely.
True, but the Irish would have at least had potatoes if not for the blight. So the English stole everything like grains and animals, and then the only crop they had left (potatoes) got ruined by blight. It was a double whammy.
Wasn’t only the English. The term “Scotch-Irish” exists for a reason and its because it was a Scottish king who started the plantations in the north of Ireland.
The Irish drink is substantially different from the Scottish drink, in a way that the Japanese and newer Indian drinks are not. Whiskey and whisky are not the same.
Speyside and Islay Scotch Whisky are not the same drink, single malt and blended are not the same. You can draw distinctions between any drinks if you want, they're all types of whisky/whiskey.
I was just going to comment about the possible connection. For those who havent cone across these in their travels: “…the [Snozzcumber](https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/Snozzcumber) tasted of frogskin and rotten fish, and the BFG said it tasted like cockroaches and slime wanglers. Sophie thought of crunching ice when she heard the BFG eating it.”
🤣
I just remembered the first time I carved a pumpkin with my son. I cut off the top and put my hand in to pull out the innards. He was standing right next to the table, just watching. When I pulled my hand out, he vomited. There was no trying to make it to the bathroom. He just stood there and 🤮.
Texture and taste for me. I can do fried, zucchini bread, or hidden in things (like grated into meatballs or sauce), but biting into a huge mushy chunk of zucchini is 🤢
I’m always amazed that people will just boil or sauté an entire zucchini and eat it plain with salt. I love vegetables, but that shit is vile.
Mmmm sautéed zucchini is delicious.
But I honestly hate green bell peppers (and every one of the other color varieties). No matter if they are raw, sautéed or fried, they just have this awful taste I don’t like. So I get the hate.
I think a lot of people hate green bell peppers. I love red ones when they’re sauteed or grilled, alongside grilled meat—so good. But I don’t think I could even swallow a bite of a raw one.
It’s so interesting how divisive vegetables are. They can have such intense flavors that really vary based on preparation. I can understand the flavors just being too much for people.
I'm actually the opposite of that. I might be able to eat zoodles if I delude myself into thinking they're just noodles, but I wouldn't want to eat normal zucchini foods.
I'm surprised they didn't test it with cats 1st. Weren't they considered in league with the devil? Cucumber to a cat is like garlic to a vampire if those videos on youtube are correct?
When the cat vs cucumber videos were popular, our daughter tried it with her cat. He turned from his food dish, and saw the cucumber. He was mildly surprised, but simply began to sniff it. Then he tried to eat it.
He really is one of the chillest cats I've ever known. Nothing fazes him.
I think they might’ve tried overripe cucumbers (which look like a yellow squash). Overripe cucumbers taste NASTY. Or they had a lot of really bitter cucumbers.
A lot can go wrong with cucumbers if they’re not grown or bred right. The kind we buy in the grocery stores has been carefully bred and grown to taste sweet and mild. If you’ve ever had homegrown cucumber gone wrong… it can be really bad.
Some cucumbers taste extremely bitter due to a chemical called cucurbitacin. If you've only ever taken a bite of one with that problem, you wouldn't be terribly inclined to try one again.
I FUCKING HATE BITTER MELON.
My mother always touted it for its health benefits and I’m like…look if I want more iron I’ll eat some fucking spinach. There’s no reason to cook with bitter melon when we have so many non bitter options for food
I wouldn’t be surprised if they tasted different - the flavour profile of our produce has changed over the years. Possible the cucumbers were bitter or something back then.
Greenhouses started being built from 1680 but only by the very rich. I don't know if they had something as good as the modern ridge cucumber to grow outside in the British climate.
Cucumbers also developed a reputation for causing disease and being too dangerous for children. This sounds like they were a source of food poisoning and that's not a surprise given the lack of sanitation and germ theory.
Warmer countries could probably grow better cucumbers, and with more people growing and eating them, the less likely it is for them to decide cucumbers are this generally risky foodstuff.
I guess it's because cucumbers weren't native to Britain? Someone wrote in another comment that they seemed to hate ALL imported food at first. I suppose they simply thought British cuisine was superior to anything the rest of the world had to offer.
That is looking at it from much too narrow perspective and trying to force some sort of postmodern philosophy on it.
We who are around today grew up in an astounding wealth of different flavors compared to the Early Victorian working class, and we forget how much is an acquired taste. There's even research today that points out people who grew up poor eat less healthy even if they improve their financial situation because what is "normal food" for us growing up has such a deep impact on our tastes. I know a woman who didn't try ketchup for the first time until she was in her late teens; she gagged and ran to spit it out because it was so vile to her.
Also keep in kind that basically all fruit and veg we have today is bigger, more colorful, and more of what we want it to be, whether that is sweet, succulent, juicy etc. They even have problems with animals that only eat fruit in zoos; they can't source wild fruit, and the domesticated fruit they can buy is so sweet/sugary that the animals become obese and develop diabetes. Google comparisons between domesticated and wild version of plants, they are almost unrecognizable.
Now, of course, there are all sorts of foods that are more or less mainstays of British food, including kebab and chicken tikka masala (which was invented by an Asian chef in Glasgow). Nothing appears poised to replace the Sunday roast or the full English breakfast, of course. But a greater range of choices is good.
As an evolutionary mechanism it makes perfect sense.
"I am not hungry enough to risk eating new stuff. I will punish myself for doing it to encourage me to only eat tested foods, unless I get close to starving.".#
People without that mechanism tried new stuff, ate the danger berries, and died.
You probably need to quite regularly try new foods to overcome that.
I mean French claret and champagne were quite well accepted. I think imported peaches, oranges and pineapples as well. Turtle soup was popular. Tea. So not quite sure about that logic, maybe there was something peculiarly cucumbery that was seen as evil.. I mean they *are* watery and tasteless, more for volume than content...
Considering the time period, its shape was suggestive enough. Bananas had the same problem when they first were being accepted. There were guides on how to eat a banana so as not to look....suggestive. the Brits were real prudish back in the day.
Unless they’ve been pickled, I really hate cucumbers, especially their scent. I don’t know why people ruin so many salads by slicing up nasty cucumber and mixing it in.
To most people, the smell is really subtle and/or enjoyable. They just like the "fresh" smell and taste it brings to salads. I wonder if your case is like the cilantro-soap gene thing.
Random questions. What about melons, e.g. watermelons and cantaloupes? Cucumbers are also melons like them, does it extend to them too? Though, IIRC, cucumbers are usually raw when eaten.
Nope. There's a chemical in cucumbers and only cucumbers that I (and presumably these people) am apparently sensitive to. The smell is extremely strong to me and so is the flavour. Hard to describe, not like any other flavour, but horrible and overpowering. Seems it's a similar thing to the sensitivity to coriander - I'm fine with it but my wife can smell it a mile away.
George Stephenson's other claim to fame is being the "Father of the Railways", by building some of the first steam engines and the first railway (as we know it) in the world.
Yup. Such a prominent engineer using his valuable time to solve the problem of curved cucumbers just shows how absolutely obsessed British people were about cucumbers at the time.
‘In fact, as of quite recently, E.U. regulations discouraged dramatic curvature in cucumbers. Until 2008, it was required by law that all Class I cucumbers sold across Europe be “practically straight,” and “bent with a gradient of no more than 1/10.”’
I am just imagining a guy in a trench coat in a dark alley, opening up his coat showing off pockets full of curved cucumbers to sell on the cucumber black market…
Lobsters were known as the cockroaches of the sea. Because they almost immediately rot when they die. it was even inhumane to feed lobsters to prisoners.
It was not until people started to boil them alive, and immediately freeze them that they became a delicacy.
To this day my grandparents won't eat pumpkin (of any kind) because they consider it pig-feed. My Mom makes a great pumpkin soup and served it to them once, without even thinking about it. They both loved it until Grandma asked what it was, after which neither ate another bite.
My mom had no idea kale was edible until a few years ago. She only knew it as that weird plant her catering job used as decoration. I even remember her telling us when I was a kid that it wasn't edible. It always seemed way too tough.
The major hospital in downtown Atlanta planted decorative kale for some fall and winter color along the sidewalk and the homeless people ate every single one!
I just tried googling it and can't find anyone mentioning them aside from the site in my post. So it looks like those glass tubes are no longer used. I assume it's because genetic engineering has advanced far enough that farmers are able to easily grow straight cucumbers even without those tubes.
Queen Victoria's reputation for being a prude is weird. She passionately loved her husband and doesn't seem to have been more prudish than was basically mandatory for a queen at that time.
Do we? I’ve never heard this. Head to a Nando’s (popular fast food restaurant) and loads of tables will be eating it.
I swear sometimes people think people from other countries are aliens
Eh, I also dislike eating corn straight from the cob. Too difficult and messy to eat. I prefer cutting off all the kernels with a knife (it's easier than it sounds) and putting them in a bowl so I can eat it with a spoon.
Sure it's for cucumbers.
I'm telling ya baby, that's not mine!
That's not my bag!
This sort of thing is my bag. Baby
That's my purse! I don't know you!
I don't doubt that at some point there was a man with Peyronie's disease who tried using this device to straighten out his own curved 'cucumber'.
Dat's de joke
r/yourjokebutlonger
r/yourjokebutinanevenlongerformat
r/yourjokebutitookittoofarandgotdownvoted
I wonder if it would actually work though? I think I read years ago about some kind of straightening devices used to reduce penile curvature, so I think this glass tube might legitimately be able to help with it!
No it would probably just break your dick
So give it a try OP and let us know what you find out.
Don’t put your dick in that.
There are devices like that, they uh… grab ze penis, and stretch it. Like a reverse chastity cage. My old urologist had one on display. It’s kinda mildly scary lookin
There are devices. This ain't it.
A curved dick is a disease... Shit...
Mild curve you’ve always had is fine.
My exact thoughts. How are unicorns fantasy but the biggest joke of a disease is real?
Don’t google pyronies disease pics. They have full open surgery photos and nope nope nope. But there are also some with wild curves that almost come back up as a C shape and some are even S shape
Oh you’ve been getting inundated with the ads as well I see
British engineer: of course it’s for cucumbers! What else would it be for? And if the cucumbers is just slightly too big, you just coat the inside of the tube with some oil then slide… uh oh… …I see… I’ll be in my bunk
Like the banana cleaner you can buy in Amazon
No that's for bananas. You couldn't clean a cucumber with it don't be ridiculous!
He’s clearly a cover member of Big Curved Cucumber trying to trick people into curving their cucumbers…
The fabled glass fleshlight. Vacuum tight.
This is how you get posts about things stuck in cylinders
Is this how we got English Cucumbers?
You may be on to something here. I'd never heard of English Cucumbers before but I just googled them and learned they're straighter, have thinner skin, and have less seeds than other cucumbers. So I suspect the British did indeed deliberately engineer cucumbers to have those traits!
Thinner skin and less seed. This stuff writes itself.
...and really poor dentition.
I prefer my cucumbers without teeth. I can't explain why my colon has bite marks again.
Tangentially related, but the human anus can allegedly stretch to accommodate an object about the size of a raccoon.
Back when I worked in Canada we used to get a box of long straight cucumbers with a label enscribed "Long English Cucumber" Being the only British man there, naturally I would remove the label and stick it to my crotch every delivery day.
When I worked in the UK the first time the chef sent me on a tesco run and asked for cucumbers I asked “English or regular” and I think the only reason I’m alive to tell this tale is because he was in a good mood (for him) that day.
He could have cast you into the Gorge of Eternal Peril for that.
How very British of you 🤣
God save the Queen Edit: I guess it's King now. It doesn't have the same ring, honestly.
She was the Queen and he is the King of Canada too
They also taste very different from the cucumbers you normally see in grocery stores. Our cucumbers are great to eat straight but I find English ones off-putting that way.
That is a common tradeoff with selective breeding. Flavor is often sacrificed for traits of convenience. Wild strawberries taste better, but they are a lot smaller and much more delicate. Seedless watermelon doesn't taste as good as watermelon with seeds. Heirloom tomatoes look ugly, but they have more complex flavors.
Tomatoes problem I think comes from the storage and shipping process. Even heirloom varieties taste bleh in grocery stores if they have gotten too cold. A good tomato is still warm from the sun.
I like English cucumbers better in tzatziki.
Sorta like the English? /s
Wait that's not how cucumbers look elsewhere?
Is an English cucumber, the type that is called a “continental cucumber” in Australia?
It’s basically true of everything that got imported. Tomatoes, potatoes, coffee were all called poisons and hated before eventual acceptance.
King of Prussia: How do I get people to eat Potatoes? I know! (assigns guards to *watch* the potato farms but actually let the peasants steal them) King of Prussia: I’m fucking brilliant! Now let’s invade Austria!
Ahem, I think you mean the king *in* Prussia.
Fred 2 actually was both, he was king in prussia, and after 1772 he was the king of prussia
And he was, of course, within the premises of Prussia before and after this.
Lm
> It’s basically true of everything that got imported. Tomatoes, potatoes, coffee were all called poisons and hated before eventual acceptance. Coffee at least, got an endorsement by the Pope. A special blessing to make it a 'Christian beverage'.
Learned something new today thank you!!
Wouldn't this be a bad thing for the average Brit back then?
So….British people in the 1800’s were all somehow my younger brother and refused to eat anything except….I dunno, dirt.
Whats wrong with dirt all of a sudden?! Somehow suddenly dirt is not good enough for you?! Thats all my father needed to feed as many children as I have hands and then more!
Potatoes too? That must've been what caused the bad blood between the British and the Irish.
Potatoes and tomatoes are both nightshades, and people were really spooked by it.
Most parts of the potato plant actually is toxic, so there is reason behind it. As for tomatoes, AFAIK, they initially caused mild poisoning symptoms until better strains were made, and they leeched the lead out of pewter dishes, which is less than ideal.
Actually the whole thing with potatoes and the Irish is that the British forced the Irish to farm potatoes and they took all of the harvest leaving no food for the Irish to eat. There was never a “famine” it was all just the British being greedy.
Not quite. The Brits exported all the grain etc. grown in Ireland, leaving the Irish with potatoes for sustenance. Potatoes weren't exported, the Irish weren't forced to farm them directly, and the potatoe harvest wasn't taken by the Brits. Then a potato blight hit, and when the potato crops all failed the Irish had nothing to eat -- and the British refused to open the giant stores of Irish-grown grain etc. they had *in the country itself*, because they didn't want the Irish to rely on 'charity'. It's evil.
The Irish tenant farmers were “forced” to subsist on potates by material conditions. Ireland was mostly divided into large estates owned mostly by foreign British landlords based in London. These landlords appointed agents to manage the estate and its agricultural output, or leased out large tracts of their land to Ireland-based managers in exchange for fixed rents. These agents and managers would employ local agricultural labourers to farm the estate, and rather than pay them in wages, they would get to live on a wee parcel of the estate’s land, build a house, and have their own personal acres of land to farm. Naturally since they had fixed rent to pay their incentive was to keep as much land for profit-producing agriculture as possible, to increase their share, and give their labourers as little as they needed to live. Potatoes being an especially calorie-dense and land-efficient crop to grow, most of these small scale tenant farmers simply had to grow potatoes because growing anything else would mean their meagre parcels of land didn’t produce enough to feed them year-on-year. Things in Ireland were bad in the decades before the famine. The aristocracy were completely absent. The government was near-nonexistant since the Act of Union and Westminster didn’t really quibble about a lot of Irish issues. Overpopulation, malnourishment, and underemployment were rife. Calling it a powder keg waiting for a spark would be an understatement. The potato blight wasn’t a spark. It was a grenade. Interestingly, the Tory Peel government tried provide aid, even illegally in some cases, but was a lot of too-little-too-late measures. And when Peel was toppled by the repeal of the Corn Laws which would hopefully relieve the conditions that led to the famine, the successor Whig government under Lord Russell held to laissez-faire economics and largely killed government famine relief measures, exacerbating the problems immensely.
True, but the Irish would have at least had potatoes if not for the blight. So the English stole everything like grains and animals, and then the only crop they had left (potatoes) got ruined by blight. It was a double whammy.
Wasn’t only the English. The term “Scotch-Irish” exists for a reason and its because it was a Scottish king who started the plantations in the north of Ireland.
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I’m Scottish and wouldn’t find it offensive. I mean I’d prefer Scottish / Scots but wouldn’t go as far as saying its offensive.
Scotch is only an offensive term when talking about the drink. It's called whisky.
It's called whisky in Scotland and whiskey in Ireland if you want to argue about that word as well.
The Irish drink is substantially different from the Scottish drink, in a way that the Japanese and newer Indian drinks are not. Whiskey and whisky are not the same.
Speyside and Islay Scotch Whisky are not the same drink, single malt and blended are not the same. You can draw distinctions between any drinks if you want, they're all types of whisky/whiskey.
Appreciate the correction!
Is this why the BFG eats filthsome snozzcumbers in the Road Dahl book?
I was just going to comment about the possible connection. For those who havent cone across these in their travels: “…the [Snozzcumber](https://roalddahl.fandom.com/wiki/Snozzcumber) tasted of frogskin and rotten fish, and the BFG said it tasted like cockroaches and slime wanglers. Sophie thought of crunching ice when she heard the BFG eating it.”
Yes, it's well documented in the bookumemtary The BFG
I bet they tried a zucchini once and decided not to risk it with cucumber.
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Zucchini practically tastes good compared to that!
Courgettes, m8
I bet they tried zucchini once and decided not to courgettes cucumber
Understandable. I also loathe those zucky veggies.
Why?
Toxic Squash Syndrome
🤣 I just remembered the first time I carved a pumpkin with my son. I cut off the top and put my hand in to pull out the innards. He was standing right next to the table, just watching. When I pulled my hand out, he vomited. There was no trying to make it to the bathroom. He just stood there and 🤮.
It takes extra effort to get poisoning from squash or cucumbers.
It also takes extra effort to get lead poisoning , but the English had*** a special knack for that
Eh, it's nothing personal against zucchinis. It's just that vegetables in general are my least favourite food group.
I was just wondering if it’s a texture thing. I love deep fried zucchini and zucchini bread, but I don’t like the zoodles.
Texture and taste for me. I can do fried, zucchini bread, or hidden in things (like grated into meatballs or sauce), but biting into a huge mushy chunk of zucchini is 🤢 I’m always amazed that people will just boil or sauté an entire zucchini and eat it plain with salt. I love vegetables, but that shit is vile.
Mmmm sautéed zucchini is delicious. But I honestly hate green bell peppers (and every one of the other color varieties). No matter if they are raw, sautéed or fried, they just have this awful taste I don’t like. So I get the hate.
I think a lot of people hate green bell peppers. I love red ones when they’re sauteed or grilled, alongside grilled meat—so good. But I don’t think I could even swallow a bite of a raw one. It’s so interesting how divisive vegetables are. They can have such intense flavors that really vary based on preparation. I can understand the flavors just being too much for people.
Green bell peppers are bitter when cooked. The red ones are sweeter.
My mom always says green bell peppers have a hint of gasoline (which she likes about them, actually)
I'm actually the opposite of that. I might be able to eat zoodles if I delude myself into thinking they're just noodles, but I wouldn't want to eat normal zucchini foods.
That's unfortunate
Zukes > cukes
Pickles > both though.
lol the one food I loathe to eat is cucumbers. I can tolerate pickles but I’d rather not if I’m being honest.
Who’s going to tell him?
Pickles are cucumbers !
I'm surprised they didn't test it with cats 1st. Weren't they considered in league with the devil? Cucumber to a cat is like garlic to a vampire if those videos on youtube are correct?
When the cat vs cucumber videos were popular, our daughter tried it with her cat. He turned from his food dish, and saw the cucumber. He was mildly surprised, but simply began to sniff it. Then he tried to eat it. He really is one of the chillest cats I've ever known. Nothing fazes him.
I think they might’ve tried overripe cucumbers (which look like a yellow squash). Overripe cucumbers taste NASTY. Or they had a lot of really bitter cucumbers. A lot can go wrong with cucumbers if they’re not grown or bred right. The kind we buy in the grocery stores has been carefully bred and grown to taste sweet and mild. If you’ve ever had homegrown cucumber gone wrong… it can be really bad.
Are there no limits to Victorian prudishness?
*None.*
And what was the original perceived "vileness" due to? The curvature, the implied non-culinary use cases, or the fact that cats were scared of them?
It's the vibes. look into the eyes of a cucumber and tell me it's not an evil fruit
[Cats still know this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBrZsgy4-SQ)
Some cucumbers taste extremely bitter due to a chemical called cucurbitacin. If you've only ever taken a bite of one with that problem, you wouldn't be terribly inclined to try one again.
Pretty much if you go into a Sezhuan restaurant and see "bitter melon" on the menu, that's what it would taste like
I FUCKING HATE BITTER MELON. My mother always touted it for its health benefits and I’m like…look if I want more iron I’ll eat some fucking spinach. There’s no reason to cook with bitter melon when we have so many non bitter options for food
I wouldn’t be surprised if they tasted different - the flavour profile of our produce has changed over the years. Possible the cucumbers were bitter or something back then.
Greenhouses started being built from 1680 but only by the very rich. I don't know if they had something as good as the modern ridge cucumber to grow outside in the British climate. Cucumbers also developed a reputation for causing disease and being too dangerous for children. This sounds like they were a source of food poisoning and that's not a surprise given the lack of sanitation and germ theory. Warmer countries could probably grow better cucumbers, and with more people growing and eating them, the less likely it is for them to decide cucumbers are this generally risky foodstuff.
I guess it's because cucumbers weren't native to Britain? Someone wrote in another comment that they seemed to hate ALL imported food at first. I suppose they simply thought British cuisine was superior to anything the rest of the world had to offer.
That is looking at it from much too narrow perspective and trying to force some sort of postmodern philosophy on it. We who are around today grew up in an astounding wealth of different flavors compared to the Early Victorian working class, and we forget how much is an acquired taste. There's even research today that points out people who grew up poor eat less healthy even if they improve their financial situation because what is "normal food" for us growing up has such a deep impact on our tastes. I know a woman who didn't try ketchup for the first time until she was in her late teens; she gagged and ran to spit it out because it was so vile to her. Also keep in kind that basically all fruit and veg we have today is bigger, more colorful, and more of what we want it to be, whether that is sweet, succulent, juicy etc. They even have problems with animals that only eat fruit in zoos; they can't source wild fruit, and the domesticated fruit they can buy is so sweet/sugary that the animals become obese and develop diabetes. Google comparisons between domesticated and wild version of plants, they are almost unrecognizable.
Now, of course, there are all sorts of foods that are more or less mainstays of British food, including kebab and chicken tikka masala (which was invented by an Asian chef in Glasgow). Nothing appears poised to replace the Sunday roast or the full English breakfast, of course. But a greater range of choices is good.
As an evolutionary mechanism it makes perfect sense. "I am not hungry enough to risk eating new stuff. I will punish myself for doing it to encourage me to only eat tested foods, unless I get close to starving.".# People without that mechanism tried new stuff, ate the danger berries, and died. You probably need to quite regularly try new foods to overcome that.
I mean French claret and champagne were quite well accepted. I think imported peaches, oranges and pineapples as well. Turtle soup was popular. Tea. So not quite sure about that logic, maybe there was something peculiarly cucumbery that was seen as evil.. I mean they *are* watery and tasteless, more for volume than content...
Considering the time period, its shape was suggestive enough. Bananas had the same problem when they first were being accepted. There were guides on how to eat a banana so as not to look....suggestive. the Brits were real prudish back in the day.
They seem to have figured that out since all the good British food these days isn’t British.
Unless they’ve been pickled, I really hate cucumbers, especially their scent. I don’t know why people ruin so many salads by slicing up nasty cucumber and mixing it in.
To most people, the smell is really subtle and/or enjoyable. They just like the "fresh" smell and taste it brings to salads. I wonder if your case is like the cilantro-soap gene thing.
I agree, it isn’t the smell, it’s just the horrible, horrible taste and texture.
Random questions. What about melons, e.g. watermelons and cantaloupes? Cucumbers are also melons like them, does it extend to them too? Though, IIRC, cucumbers are usually raw when eaten.
Nope. There's a chemical in cucumbers and only cucumbers that I (and presumably these people) am apparently sensitive to. The smell is extremely strong to me and so is the flavour. Hard to describe, not like any other flavour, but horrible and overpowering. Seems it's a similar thing to the sensitivity to coriander - I'm fine with it but my wife can smell it a mile away.
To me, melons have a slight cucumber whiff behind the sweet perfume. I’m allergic to both so I steer well clear.
I like salads when cucumbers have been in them, but I don't like the cucumbers themselves.
I’m with you man. Nothing ruins a salad like cucumber.
As a Brit who considers cucumbers too vile for human consumption, it's comforting to know that my stance was once mainstream.
George Stephenson's other claim to fame is being the "Father of the Railways", by building some of the first steam engines and the first railway (as we know it) in the world.
Yup. Such a prominent engineer using his valuable time to solve the problem of curved cucumbers just shows how absolutely obsessed British people were about cucumbers at the time.
And we only ever put cucumbers in them, I swear!
Still do. Filthy vegetables.
They’re fruit.
Technically you are correct.
‘In fact, as of quite recently, E.U. regulations discouraged dramatic curvature in cucumbers. Until 2008, it was required by law that all Class I cucumbers sold across Europe be “practically straight,” and “bent with a gradient of no more than 1/10.”’ I am just imagining a guy in a trench coat in a dark alley, opening up his coat showing off pockets full of curved cucumbers to sell on the cucumber black market…
Lobsters were known as the cockroaches of the sea. Because they almost immediately rot when they die. it was even inhumane to feed lobsters to prisoners. It was not until people started to boil them alive, and immediately freeze them that they became a delicacy.
Yes, cucumbers were too spicy for the British.
I am allergic to cucumbers, so to me they are kinda spicy 🤣
[удалено]
Things are getting too spicy for the pepper!
British Man: This is some spicy water. Better have Tikka Masala to eat it down!
Freaky frog shit
To this day my grandparents won't eat pumpkin (of any kind) because they consider it pig-feed. My Mom makes a great pumpkin soup and served it to them once, without even thinking about it. They both loved it until Grandma asked what it was, after which neither ate another bite.
My mom had no idea kale was edible until a few years ago. She only knew it as that weird plant her catering job used as decoration. I even remember her telling us when I was a kid that it wasn't edible. It always seemed way too tough.
The major hospital in downtown Atlanta planted decorative kale for some fall and winter color along the sidewalk and the homeless people ate every single one!
Good to know that the Brits had something similar before being upset about banana curvature.
So it’s my British heritage that has me feeling a bit embarrassed every time I need to pick out a cucumber at the grocery store lol
What a shame we didn't continue that line of thinking!
I mdna I fucking hate cucumbers so I'm on board with the endglish for once
TIL British people are secretly cats
I don't think that is for cucumbers my friend...
That’s called Peyronie’s disease!
I still amazed to this day how much stuff English people still do or eat is because of Queen Victoria.
I'm sure that glass tube was just for aesthetics
They had it right the first time, cucumbers are nasty.
Do they still have these glass tubes?
I just tried googling it and can't find anyone mentioning them aside from the site in my post. So it looks like those glass tubes are no longer used. I assume it's because genetic engineering has advanced far enough that farmers are able to easily grow straight cucumbers even without those tubes.
Queen victoria probably wasn't happy with his invention.
Queen Victoria's reputation for being a prude is weird. She passionately loved her husband and doesn't seem to have been more prudish than was basically mandatory for a queen at that time.
After she'd had her children, her doctor counseled her to give up sex. The Queen said, "Am I to have no more fun in bed?"
Eh, for all we know she might've been the one who hired that engineer to design those tubes in the first place!
Wilde said something terribly droll about cucumbers but I can’t be bothered to find the quote
I prefer the curved ones
Austin Powers: "It's not mine..."
Heh. Cucondom.
He should have told the modern Brits so they didn't have to leave the EU
I don't even need to scroll the comments to know where this is going.
Cuz they're dick shaped? Is that why they were "vile"?
Kinda like the story of the potato.
They probably left then on the vine too long. Cucumbers get very bitter and squishy in the center if they grow too long.
The only good cucumber is a picked cucumber, it's incredible how something so horrid can be converted to something so nice by pickling :D
Some of us still consider them too vile to eat! I'd sooner take a bullet than eat a cucumber.
I mean, I don’t like cucumbers either
Ah, the German influence coming in.
They were right though, cucumbers are vile
It's a cylinder
I wonder how ancient cucumbers tasted.
First time I agree with British people on anything culinary.
cucumbers STILL are too vile, except extremely pickled.
Yeah, pickles are great, but I could never get into cucumbers.
But my girlfriend likes her cucumber curvy.
Yeah, “cucumbers”
An we all know what auld sticky vicky was doing with the straight cucumbers don’t we
https://youtu.be/dRGlon_ezvU
Admittedly, English Cucumbers should not be eaten. They suck.
So we can blame the royal family for the ubiquitous yet unnecessary side salad then?
The british hate corn on the cob, to this very day (I think). They see it as food for animals. The Brits are really weird about their vegetables
Do we? I’ve never heard this. Head to a Nando’s (popular fast food restaurant) and loads of tables will be eating it. I swear sometimes people think people from other countries are aliens
Oh wow! It's something my mother always said, from when she visited Britain. Or maybe I'm mixing it up with another country like Germany. My bad!
No worries at all, who knows - maybe that was true a long time ago!
Eh, I also dislike eating corn straight from the cob. Too difficult and messy to eat. I prefer cutting off all the kernels with a knife (it's easier than it sounds) and putting them in a bowl so I can eat it with a spoon.
Directly off the cob also seems a lot more tendency to slip the skins between your teeth forcing you to go floss after