A person can go a lifetime without having a single nice thought about the cucumber. It might be bulking up salads or smuggled into sandwiches, kebabs and sushi rolls, but for most people, if they do spare the cucumber a thought, it is only to nudge it to the side of the plate. Dr. Johnson, the English essayist who had an opinion on just about everything, recommended that it should be “well sliced, and dressed with vinegar and pepper, and then thrown out as good for nothing.”

It does not help that cucumbers are approximately 95% water, making them (particularly those suggestively large supermarket ones) somewhat insipid and texturally treacherous. Meanwhile, the skin—where all of that recognizably “cucumber” flavor concentrates—tends toward chlorophyllic bitterness.¹ Yet even those who can’t stand that electric flavor can be turned. You just need to do the unthinkable: You need to cook it.

Broadly speaking, American cooks do not dare to warm the cucumber. To heat vegetables is to break them down, to make them softer and wetter, and it is hard to think of a vegetable (technically a fruit, but let’s not quibble) that needs this less. But cucumbers also like to confound and surprise. German cooks know that if you peel and then gently stew cucumbers, they will develop the mellow sweetness of summer squash. Toss them with a mustard sauce and you have schmorgurken, an unimpeachable side dish for beef or pork.

France also offers a masterclass in this unlikely art. Take Jane Grigson’s cucumber ragôut, in which little jade coins of cucumber slip in a thickened butter sauce, or Julia Child’s braised cucumbers, peeled and cut into batons, cooked, then seasoned with lemon and dried mint. The secret to these recipes is to blanch the cucumber first in well-salted water—counterintuitively, this is what stops it from turning to mush.