Cucumber Martini Photo by Rey Lopez; food styling by Lisa Cherkasky for The Washington Post

The closest I’ve come to a bar fight recently was while eavesdropping on a conversation in which a fellow customer was holding forth to his date about the pointlessness of the cucumber.

“Why do people even bother with cucumbers?” groused the anti-cuke. “They just taste like water.”

To be fair to my misinformed fellow patron, cucumbers have long had their share of detractors. But these fruits masquerading as vegetables, whether the Kirbys (whose knobbly elliptical snouts remind me of little green humpback whales), the slender English or the Persian minis, are around 95% water, making their juice an effective source of hydration (and, thus, dilution) in a drink.

And they certainly taste like some

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