Cucumber: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. A Cucurbit, and the Melon's Close Cousin
2. The Wild Ancestor in India
3. What the Genomes Settled
4. Westward: Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East
5. Greece, Rome, and What They Actually Ate
6. Tiberius and the First Greenhouse
7. Two Routes into Medieval Europe
8. What the Herbals Show, 1300–1458
9. "Cowcumbers": Europe's Long Suspicion
10. 1494: Across the Atlantic
11. Pickling: How Most Cucumbers Were Eaten
12. The Glasshouse and the Seedless Cucumber
13. "Cool as a Cucumber" Is Literally True
14. The Modern Crop
15. Research Papers and References
16. Connections
17. Featured Videos

A Cucurbit, and the Melon's Close Cousin

Cucumber belongs to the Cucurbitaceae, the gourd family, which also contains melons, watermelons, pumpkins, squashes, courgettes, bottle gourds and luffas. They are mostly trailing or climbing annuals with tendrils, large lobed leaves, separate male and female flowers, and a distinctive fruit — botanically a berry with a hard rind, called a pepo.

Within that family, cucumber sits in the genus Cucumis alongside the melon, Cucumis melo. The two are close relatives and have been confused with one another for most of recorded history, which is not a trivial footnote — it is the single largest source of error in the cucumber's written record. Ancient and medieval writers used names loosely, translators applied modern species names to old words, and a great deal of "cucumber history" in popular sources is actually melon history.

Where the two differ is instructive. Cucumber is eaten unripe, when it is green, crisp and non-sweet; melon is eaten ripe and sweet. Cucumber has an unmistakable cool, green flavour driven by aldehyde compounds; melon does not. But some melon cultivars — the snake melon or Armenian cucumber, Cucumis melo var. flexuosus, and the related vegetable melons — are eaten young, taste cucumber-like, and look enough like a long cucumber to be sold as one. Those are almost certainly the "cucumbers" of many ancient texts.

Modern taxonomy also had to be corrected on a related point. For most of the twentieth century, cucumber was placed with the African Cucumis species, and its origin was often given as Africa on that basis. Molecular work, discussed below, moved it decisively to Asia and rearranged the genus around it.

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The Wild Ancestor in India

Cucumber's domestication centre is India, and the evidence is unusually direct, because the wild progenitor is still there.

Cucumis sativus var. hardwickii grows wild in the Himalayan foothills and across parts of the Indian subcontinent. It is recognisably a cucumber and unmistakably a wild one: the fruit is small, oval, prolifically produced, and intensely bitter with cucurbitacins — the defence compounds discussed on the safety page. It crosses readily with cultivated cucumber to give fertile offspring, which is the practical test of close relationship, and plant breeders have used it as a germplasm source for exactly that reason. Staub and Kupper's work on backcrossing hardwickii germplasm into cultivated cucumber, published in the mid-1980s, is one example of a long line of breeding programmes that have mined the wild form for disease resistance and multiple fruiting.

The Indian subcontinent is also cucumber's centre of genetic diversity, which is the classic signature of a crop's homeland: the longer a crop has been grown somewhere, the more variation accumulates. Indian landraces are strikingly diverse compared with the narrow, uniform material grown commercially elsewhere.

Domestication is usually dated to roughly three thousand years ago or somewhat earlier, though precise dating is difficult. Cucurbit remains preserve poorly — the fruit is almost entirely water, and the seeds and rind fragments that do survive are hard to identify to species. That is why the crop's early history has been rewritten repeatedly as genetic methods improved rather than as new archaeology emerged.

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What the Genomes Settled

Cucumber has been unusually well served by modern genetics, partly because it is a compact, economically important crop and partly because it makes a good model for studying fruit and sex determination in plants. Four bodies of work matter for its history.

The species relationships. Sebastian, Schaefer, Telford and Renner, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sampled Cucumis broadly and produced a result that overturned the textbook account. They showed that cucumber and melon have numerous wild relatives in Asia and Australia, and that the sister species of melon is Australian — a finding that relocated the genus's centre of diversity away from Africa and placed cucumber firmly within an Asian and Australasian radiation. Cucumber's Indian origin sits naturally within that picture.

The genome. Huang and colleagues published the cucumber genome in Nature Genetics in 2009 — among the earliest sequenced vegetable crops, and the foundation for everything that followed.

Domestication and diversity. Qi and colleagues built a genomic variation map from a large panel of cultivated and wild accessions and used it to identify the genetic basis of cucumber domestication and diversity. Lv and colleagues, working with a broad collection including Indian material, characterised the genetic diversity and population structure of the crop, confirming the distinctness and richness of the Indian group relative to the East Asian, Eurasian and other cultivated types.

Bitterness. Shang and colleagues, in Science, mapped how cucurbitacin C is made and regulated, and showed that domestication acted on the switch controlling bitterness in the fruit while leaving the leaf defence in place. That is, in a real sense, the central event in the cucumber's history as a food: the transition from the bitter hardwickii gourd to something a person would willingly eat.

Taken together, these studies do something that the documentary record could not. They establish the homeland independently of what any ancient author wrote, and they resolve the melon confusion at the level of the plants themselves rather than at the level of the words used for them.

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Westward: Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East

From India, cucurbits moved west along the trade and migration routes that connected the subcontinent to Persia, Mesopotamia and the Levant. Cucumber-like plants appear in the agricultural and literary record of the ancient Near East, and cucumbers are a recurring image in the region's writing — famously in the Hebrew Bible, where the Israelites in the wilderness remember the cucumbers and melons of Egypt.

Two cautions belong beside every one of these references, and both are the same problem in different clothes.

The first is identification. The Hebrew, Akkadian, Greek and Latin words usually rendered as "cucumber" are generic terms for elongated, non-sweet cucurbits. Scholars working on the biblical and Mesopotamian material generally think the plants meant were more likely the snake melon or a related vegetable melon than Cucumis sativus. The translations were made by Europeans who knew cucumbers, and the word choice reflects the translator's garden more than the writer's.

The second is dating. Because these are textual references without accompanying plant remains identifiable to species, they establish that people in the ancient Near East ate elongated green cucurbits — which nobody doubts — without establishing which species, or when cucumber proper arrived.

The defensible summary is that cucumber probably reached Persia and the Near East in antiquity, that it was one of several similar cucurbits grown there, and that separating it from its relatives in the written record is beyond what the sources can support. Paris and colleagues' work, discussed below, is the most rigorous attempt to do exactly that for the medieval period, and it is instructive precisely because it shows how much careful evidence is needed to make the distinction stick.

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Greece, Rome, and What They Actually Ate

Greek and Roman writers discuss cucumbers at length. Theophrastus describes their cultivation, Dioscorides their medical uses, Columella their husbandry, and Pliny the Elder devotes a passage of the Natural History to them that is the single most quoted piece of cucumber writing in existence.

Roman cucumbers were grown with real technical sophistication: sown in enriched beds, sometimes started early under cover, trained and watered attentively, and eaten young. Medical writers assigned them cooling properties in the humoral scheme — the same classification that South Asian and Islamic medicine gave them — and prescribed them for hot conditions and fevers, while warning that they were hard to digest.

Here, though, the modern scholarship requires a correction that most popular accounts have not caught up with. Harry Paris and colleagues have argued, on the basis of the descriptions themselves, the iconography, and the later record, that the classical sikyos and cucumis most often referred to the snake melon — a long, ribbed, pale, cucumber-flavoured form of Cucumis melo — rather than to Cucumis sativus. Their work on the occidental diffusion of the cucumber places the arrival of the true cucumber in Europe in the period between roughly 500 and 1300 CE, well after the classical authors were writing.

This does not empty the Roman material of interest; it relabels it. The Romans were enthusiastic growers of a cucumber-like vegetable, they developed genuine horticultural technique around it, and the taste for cool green cucurbits in the Mediterranean is ancient. What is doubtful is that the specific plant was the one in your salad. It is a good example of how a well-attested text can be entirely reliable about the practice while being ambiguous about the species.

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Tiberius and the First Greenhouse

The best story in the whole of cucumber history is also, unusually, well documented, and it belongs to the emperor Tiberius, who ruled from 14 to 37 CE.

Pliny the Elder records in the Natural History that Tiberius was never without cucumbers, and wanted them on his table every day of the year. Since cucumbers are a warm-season crop that will not tolerate frost, this created a problem that the imperial gardeners solved with genuine ingenuity. Pliny describes fruit grown in raised beds mounted on wheels, which could be trundled out into the sun during the day and wheeled back under shelter at night or in poor weather. In the colder months the beds were covered with specularia — frames glazed with sheets of transparent stone, most probably selenite (a clear form of gypsum) or mica, which could be split into thin translucent plates. Columella describes comparable forcing techniques.

What this amounts to is a working greenhouse, roughly sixteen centuries before glass made them ordinary. Every essential element is present: a translucent cover admitting light while retaining heat, protection from frost, and a movable growing bed to make the most of the sun. It is one of the earliest documented instances of protected cultivation anywhere.

Two honest notes. The first is the species question again: the fruit Tiberius craved was plausibly the snake melon rather than the modern cucumber, on the same reasoning as the section above. The second is that Pliny is a compiler, not an eyewitness, and the Natural History mixes careful reporting with credulous repetition. But the technical description here is coherent, matches other Roman accounts of forcing, and is consistent with materials the Romans demonstrably used for windows.

There is also a nice historical rhyme in it. Two thousand years later, the majority of the cucumbers sold in northern Europe are grown under glass or plastic, in heated houses, by growers solving exactly the problem Tiberius's gardeners solved — how to have a warm-season fruit out of season. The technology changed completely; the motivation did not.

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Two Routes into Medieval Europe

The most rigorous account of how cucumber actually reached Europe is Paris, Daunay and Janick's study of its occidental diffusion between roughly 500 and 1300 CE, published in the Annals of Botany. Working from textual sources, linguistic evidence and illustrations, they argue for two separate routes rather than one.

One route ran through the Islamic world — from Persia and Central Asia across the Middle East and North Africa, into Islamic Spain and Sicily. Arabic agricultural and medical writing describes cucumbers, and the vocabulary passed into the Romance languages along the same path that carried rice, citrus, sugar cane, aubergine and spinach into the medieval Mediterranean.

The other ran overland from Asia through the steppe and eastern Europe, entering Europe from the east and north. The Slavic and Germanic names for cucumber form a distinct group from the Romance ones, and the strong tradition of cucumber growing and pickling in eastern and northern Europe fits an arrival that did not depend on the Mediterranean.

The two-route picture explains several otherwise awkward facts: why cucumber appears in different European regions at different times, why the naming traditions do not descend from a single source, and why eastern European cucumber culture — heavy on pickling, with its own varieties — is so distinct from the Mediterranean tradition.

By the later Middle Ages the cucumber was established across Europe. It appears in monastic and household garden records, in market lists, and in the herbals, and the linguistic trail leads to the modern names: French concombre, Italian cetriolo, Spanish pepino, German Gurke, Polish ogórek, Russian ogurets — the last group visibly related to one another and not to the Romance forms.

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What the Herbals Show, 1300–1458

The companion study by Paris, Janick and Daunay does something unusual and rather satisfying: it uses pictures as primary evidence.

Medieval European herbals were illustrated, sometimes carelessly and sometimes with great care, and by examining the surviving images of Cucumis in Occidental manuscripts of 1300 to 1458 alongside the accompanying names and text, the authors could distinguish cucumber from melon in a way the words alone do not allow. Shape, surface texture, ribbing, the way the fruit is depicted attached to the vine and the stage at which it is shown — all of these separate the species where a shared name does not.

Their conclusion is that by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the cucumber was unambiguously present and being grown in Europe, and that the herbal illustrators knew the difference between cucumber and melon even where the terminology blurred it. The imagery also shows cucumber shapes recognisably close to modern types, which tells us that the essential selection work — long, non-bitter, harvested unripe — had already been done.

It is worth pausing on the method. It is a good demonstration that a well-chosen non-textual source can settle a question that centuries of reading the texts could not, and it is the reason the medieval part of the cucumber's story is now better established than the classical part.

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"Cowcumbers": Europe's Long Suspicion

Having arrived, the cucumber then spent several centuries under a cloud in western Europe, and the episode is worth telling because it is a clean example of medical theory shaping what people ate.

In English the word was commonly pronounced — and often spelled — "cowcumber" from the medieval period well into the nineteenth century. A folk etymology grew up around that pronunciation holding that the vegetable was so worthless it was fit only for cows. The etymology is wrong: the word descends from Old French coucombre and ultimately Latin cucumis, and has nothing to do with cattle. But the folk explanation stuck because it matched a real prejudice.

That prejudice came out of humoral medicine. Cucumbers were classified as cold and moist in the extreme, and cold moist foods were held to breed phlegm, chill the stomach, weaken digestion and predispose to fevers and fluxes. Raw cucumbers were therefore treated as actively risky. European medical and household writing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century repeatedly warns against them, blames them for summer fevers and bowel complaints, and advises that if they must be eaten they should be salted, drained, dressed with vinegar and pepper, or cooked.

The most famous expression of the attitude is the remark preserved in Boswell's Life of Johnson, that a cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing. It is worth being precise about that quotation: Boswell reports Johnson repeating an opinion attributed to physicians, not delivering a considered verdict of his own. It has been widely retold as Johnson's own view. Either way it captures the eighteenth-century educated attitude exactly.

The suspicion had real consequences. It kept raw cucumber marginal in respectable English cookery for generations, encouraged the practice of salting and draining slices before serving (which survives as a technique and does genuinely improve texture), and helped make pickled cucumber the dominant form — because pickling was understood to correct the vegetable's cold, damp nature.

It also, incidentally, contained a grain of something real, though not what the physicians thought. Raw produce eaten in an era of contaminated water and no refrigeration genuinely did transmit disease, and summer outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness genuinely did coincide with the salad season. The observed association was real; the causal explanation was entirely wrong. There are worse illustrations of why correlation needs a mechanism.

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1494: Across the Atlantic

Cucumbers crossed to the Americas remarkably early. The standard horticultural account has them planted on Hispaniola in 1494, on Columbus's second voyage — the expedition that carried livestock, seed and settlers with the explicit intention of establishing a permanent colony, and with it European agriculture.

What happened next is the striking part. Cucumbers were adopted by Native American growers with a speed that repeatedly surprised later European observers, who reported cucumbers being cultivated by peoples far from any European settlement, sometimes within a few generations of contact. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts from the Caribbean, from Spanish Florida, and from the eastern woodlands describe cucumbers already established in indigenous gardens.

The reason is agricultural rather than mysterious. Native American farming across much of the continent was already built on cucurbits — squashes and pumpkins were among the founding crops of the Americas, grown in the intercropped system usually called the Three Sisters alongside maize and beans. Growers who had cultivated Cucurbita for thousands of years knew exactly what to do with a new vining cucurbit: how to sow it, when to plant it, how to trellis or let it run, how to save seed. The cucumber slotted into an existing expertise, which is why it spread through indigenous trade networks far faster than European settlement did.

Cucumbers then travelled with colonists throughout the Americas, and by the eighteenth century were grown across the European colonies of North America, including at the plantations of the American founders whose garden records survive.

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Pickling: How Most Cucumbers Were Eaten

For most of the cucumber's history in Europe and the Americas, most cucumbers were not eaten fresh. They were pickled — and this is arguably the single most important fact about the crop before refrigeration.

The logic is straightforward. Cucumbers crop heavily over a short season, spoil quickly, and are ninety-five percent water. Salt-brining converts a glut into a food that keeps for months. Submerged in brine, the cucumbers ferment: lactic acid bacteria present on the fruit and in the environment consume the available sugars and produce lactic acid, dropping the pH until spoilage organisms and pathogens can no longer grow. The result keeps through winter, carries its own flavour, and requires no fuel.

Eastern and central Europe built an entire food culture on this — the barrel of brined cucumbers, dill-and-garlic seasoned, kept in a cellar, and eaten through the cold months alongside sauerkraut and other preserved vegetables. The tradition travelled with emigration, and the dill pickle of North American delicatessens descends directly from it.

The modern industry that grew out of that tradition is substantial, and it has its own research literature. Work from the United States Department of Agriculture's food science group has examined commercial cucumber fermentation in detail: Lu, Pérez-Díaz, Hayes and Breidt studied bacteriophage ecology in a commercial fermentation, showing how viruses that infect the lactic acid bacteria shape which strains dominate a tank; Zhai, Pérez-Díaz and Diaz examined whether commercial fermentation remains viable without nitrogen or air purging, a question that matters for both cost and quality. This is a reminder that a technique thousands of years old is still an active area of applied microbiology.

One distinction is worth carrying away, because it changes what you are eating. Brined, fermented pickles are made by lactic acid fermentation and, if unpasteurised and refrigerated, contain live cultures. Vinegar pickles — the shelf-stable jar — are preserved by added acetic acid with no fermentation at all, and contain no live cultures. Both are legitimate foods with a long history; only the first is a ferment in the sense meant by the literature on fermented foods. Both are salty, which is the practical caveat that applies to either.

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The Glasshouse and the Seedless Cucumber

Tiberius's wheeled beds were the beginning of a story that ran for two thousand years and ended somewhere he would have recognised immediately.

Protected cultivation of cucumbers revived seriously in early modern Europe with hotbeds — frames set over fermenting manure, whose decomposition supplied bottom heat — covered with oiled cloth or, once it became affordable, glass. English and Dutch gardeners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became expert at forcing cucumbers out of season, and a good cucumber in winter was a mark of a serious kitchen garden. Nineteenth-century advances — cheap sheet glass, cast iron framing, and boiler heating — turned that craft into an industry, and the long, straight, dark green "English" cucumber is the direct product of it.

Two twentieth-century breeding advances made the modern greenhouse cucumber what it is.

The first is gynoecy — plants bred to produce only female flowers. Cucumber is naturally monoecious, carrying separate male and female flowers on the same plant, with a substantial number of male flowers that set no fruit. An all-female plant devotes everything to fruit and crops far more heavily.

The second is parthenocarpy — the ability to set fruit without pollination. A parthenocarpic cucumber develops a full-sized fruit with no fertilisation and therefore no developed seeds. This is where the "seedless" cucumber comes from, and its advantages compound: no pollinators are needed in a sealed glasshouse, fruit set is reliable regardless of weather, the fruit is uniform, and it has no hard seeds and a milder taste. It also means the crop must be protected from pollination, since a bee that reaches a parthenocarpic plant will produce a seeded, misshapen fruit — which is why greenhouse cucumbers are grown in insect-excluded houses and why they are so consistent.

The modern long cucumber is therefore a genuinely engineered product: all-female, seedless, grown hydroponically under glass or plastic in a controlled climate, harvested continuously, and shrink-wrapped to slow the water loss its ancestors solved by being eaten the day they were picked. Alongside it, the traditional monoecious, seeded field cucumber is still grown for pickling and for markets that prefer the flavour.

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"Cool as a Cucumber" Is Literally True

The idiom is recorded in English by the early eighteenth century — the poet John Gay used the comparison in verse in 1732 — and it means unruffled, composed under pressure. What makes it unusual among idioms is that its physical premise is correct.

The interior of a cucumber growing in the field genuinely measures cooler than the surrounding air, and the mechanism is the same one that cools you when you sweat. Cucumber has a very high water content and a skin that transpires readily. Water evaporating from the surface takes its latent heat of vaporisation with it, and the fruit's large water mass buffers the temperature swing. The result is a fruit that is measurably below ambient temperature on a warm day, sometimes by a substantial margin. Anyone who has picked a cucumber in the sun and been surprised by how cool it feels has observed the effect directly.

The same physics has a practical consequence in the kitchen. Because cucumbers lose water so readily, they shrivel quickly once picked — which is why they are waxed or wrapped for sale, and why they should be kept covered in the refrigerator. Cucumbers are also chilling-sensitive: stored too cold for too long they develop water-soaked, pitted spots. The vegetable that cools itself so effectively is, ironically, one that does not enjoy being cold.

It is worth marking a small distinction here. The idiom's premise — the fruit is cool — is true. The extension sometimes made from it, that eating cucumber cools the body, is not: the thermal mass of a cucumber is trivial against the body's heat production, and any cooling you feel from eating one on a hot day is the same cooling you would get from any cold food or drink. The pleasant sensation is real; the physiology is unremarkable.

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The Modern Crop

Cucumber is today one of the most widely grown vegetables in the world, cultivated on every inhabited continent, in open fields and under protection, at every scale from a windowsill pot to industrial glasshouse complexes covering hundreds of hectares. China is by an enormous margin the largest producer, with much of the crop consumed domestically; other major producers include Turkey, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Spain and the Netherlands, the latter two supplying much of northern Europe's glasshouse trade.

The crop divides into recognisable types, and they are not interchangeable:

• Slicing cucumbers — the standard field cucumber, thicker-skinned and often waxed for shipping, grown for fresh eating.
• English or Dutch cucumbers — long, parthenocarpic, thin-skinned and seedless, glasshouse-grown and shrink-wrapped.
• Persian and Lebanese cucumbers — short, thin-skinned, crisp and mild, increasingly the preferred type for eating raw.
• Pickling cucumbers (gherkins, Kirby types) — small, bumpy, thick-fleshed and firm, bred to stay crisp through brining.
• Japanese and East Asian types — slender, ridged, thin-skinned and crisp, a distinct breeding tradition.
• Indian landraces — the genetically richest material in the crop, and the reservoir breeders return to for disease resistance and stress tolerance.

That last entry closes the circle. The commercial cucumber is a narrow, highly selected plant, and narrowness is a vulnerability: a uniform crop meets a new pest or disease uniformly. When breeders need resistance, they go back to the Indian landraces and to Cucumis sativus var. hardwickii — the small bitter wild gourd of the Himalayan foothills where the whole story began, still growing where it always did, and still the crop's insurance policy.

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Research Papers and References

1. Paris HS, Daunay MC, Janick J. Occidental diffusion of cucumber (Cucumis sativus) 500–1300 CE: two routes to Europe. Annals of Botany. 2012;109(1):117–126. — doi:10.1093/aob/mcr281
2. Paris HS, Janick J, Daunay MC. Medieval herbal iconography and lexicography of Cucumis (cucumber and melon, Cucurbitaceae) in the Occident, 1300–1458. Annals of Botany. 2011;108(3):471–484. — doi:10.1093/aob/mcr182
3. Paris HS, Amar Z, Lev E. Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Annals of Botany. 2012;110(1):23–33. — doi:10.1093/aob/mcs098
4. Sebastian P, Schaefer H, Telford IRH, Renner SS. Cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and melon (C. melo) have numerous wild relatives in Asia and Australia, and the sister species of melon is from Australia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2010;107(32):14269–14273. — doi:10.1073/pnas.1005338107
5. Huang S, Li R, Zhang Z, et al. The genome of the cucumber, Cucumis sativus L. Nature Genetics. 2009;41(12):1275–1281. — doi:10.1038/ng.475
6. Qi J, Liu X, Shen D, et al. A genomic variation map provides insights into the genetic basis of cucumber domestication and diversity. Nature Genetics. 2013;45(12):1510–1515. — doi:10.1038/ng.2801
7. Lv J, Qi J, Shi Q, et al. Genetic diversity and population structure of cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.). PLoS ONE. 2012;7(10):e46919. — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0046919
8. Shang Y, Ma Y, Zhou Y, et al. Biosynthesis, regulation, and domestication of bitterness in cucumber. Science. 2014;346(6213):1084–1088. — doi:10.1126/science.1259215
9. Zhou Y, Ma Y, Zeng J, et al. Convergence and divergence of bitterness biosynthesis and regulation in Cucurbitaceae. Nature Plants. 2016;2:16183. — doi:10.1038/nplants.2016.183
10. Staub JE, Kupper RS. Use of Cucumis sativus var. hardwickii germplasm in backcrosses with Cucumis sativus var. sativus. HortScience. 1985;20(3):436–438. — doi:10.21273/HORTSCI.20.3.436
11. Lu Z, Pérez-Díaz IM, Hayes JS, Breidt F. Bacteriophage ecology in a commercial cucumber fermentation. Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 2012;78(24):8571–8578. — doi:10.1128/AEM.01914-12
12. Zhai Y, Pérez-Díaz IM, Diaz JT. Viability of commercial cucumber fermentation without nitrogen or air purging. Trends in Food Science & Technology. 2018;81:185–192. — doi:10.1016/j.tifs.2018.05.017
13. Mukherjee PK, Nema NK, Maity N, Sarkar BK. Phytochemical and therapeutic potential of cucumber. Fitoterapia. 2013;84:227–236. — doi:10.1016/j.fitote.2012.10.003

Primary and Classical Sources

1. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XIX — the account of Tiberius's year-round cucumbers, the wheeled beds and the specularia. Perseus Digital Library: Pliny, Natural History
2. Columella, De Re Rustica, Books X and XI — Roman practice in growing and forcing cucumbers. Columella at LacusCurtius
3. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) — the source of the "sliced, dressed and thrown out" remark, reported by Boswell as an opinion Johnson repeated from physicians. Project Gutenberg: Boswell's Life of Johnson

Live PubMed Searches

1. PubMed: cucumber domestication and origin
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Connections

• Cucumber
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• Hydration and Electrolytes
• Vitamin K and Bone Health
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• All Food

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