I was walking to work awhile ago when I considered the word cucumber. Here’s a random group of facts I’ve collected about it.

The word has been in our language since the late 14^th century. It came to us from the Old French cocombre, from the Latin cucumis, which may have descended from some pre-Italic Mediterranean language. The Old English word for it was unrelated, and meant earth-apples.

The botanical name for the genus is cucumis sativus and in the 17^th, 18^th and even early 19^th centuries, the vegetable was often called a cowcumber.

It’s a member of the gourd family. We eat the fruit before it is ripe. Stuck in the part of my brain where I store food trivia is the fact that cucumber skin is the hardest substance we can digest; anything more dense will pass through us like tomato seeds.

I read today that cucumber was planted in this land in 1609, by Jamestown colonists.

I owned a copy of The Arabian Nights when I was younger, and I was enchanted by one story, which featured a damsel who served her guests a dish of cucumber stuffed with pearls. I knew it wasn’t edible but it sounded so cool to me, in all senses of the word, to replace cucumber seeds with pearls.

Speaking of cool, a cucumber really is. The phrase “cool as a cucumber” has been around as long as the food, and it was tested in 1970. Scientists took cucumber temperatures, and found that the inside of a cucumber on a warm day is about 20 degrees cooler than the field in which it reclines.