the.com/cucumber
the fruit so chill it convinced the world it was a vegetable
means A long, green-skinned fruit with crisp, watery pale flesh, eaten raw in salads or pickled into gherkins.
from From Old French 'cocombre', from Latin 'cucumis' (stem 'cucumer-'), a word of uncertain pre-Latin origin. The 'cu-' opening recalls related Latin gourd-and-vine names like 'cucurbita'. English absorbed it in the late Middle Ages; for a stretch the spelling 'cowcumber' was so common that some treated 'cucumber' as the fussy pronunciation, though it eventually won out. The phrase 'cool as a cucumber' is no idle poetry — the inside of a cucumber really does sit noticeably cooler than the air around it.
- botanically
- a fruit, technically a berry, secretly a melon relative
- inside temp
- interior runs cooler than surrounding air
- composition
- roughly 96 percent water by weight
- ancient resume
- cultivated for over three thousand years in India
- pickle pipeline
- most pickles are just cucumbers in disguise
kirby cucumber — japanese heirloom variety grown in kirby, pennsylvania since the 1800s, famous for pickling
english greenhouse cucumber — long seedless variety grown in uk hothouses, dominates european supermarkets
snake cucumber — armenian cucumber (cucumis melo var. flexuosus) grown throughout middle east, curves like a snake