Answer: To keep the moisture in.  Most (supermarket) cucumbers are waxed to keep the moisture in, because of the larger surface area of English cucumbers’ wrinkly skin, it’s easier to wrap than wax.

Other interesting facts about cucumbers:

• Cucumbers are members of gourd family Cucurbitaceae
• Cucumbers have been cultivated since 4000 or 3000 BC and had the bitter bread out of them.
• Old recipes salted cucumbers to remove bitterness.  (Though one source isn’t convinced it worked.)
• Salting cucumbers crisps them.  Soaking cucumbers in salt water however softens them.

Sources:

• Practically Edible (Food Encyclopedia) > Cucumbers
• What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science (parts available in Google books)
• Wikipedia > Cucumbers

Camera phone pictures clearly demonstrate that though beet cake batter is pepto-bismol purple/pink (!) and beet cake is not red.

Batter is purple/pink:

Baked cakes are brown:

All iced up:

Recipe review, via Gchat:

5:59 PM me: were the muffins yummy?
6:16 PM Sarah: fine–i prefer carrot cake, though.

Unfortunately, when I turned to the internet, I learned that’s not the case.  According to this recipe from Cooking Light, beet cake can indeed be made just like carrot cake and the batter is bright red but the cake bakes up to a golden brown:

From Cooking Light

This is really disappointing.  Shredding that many beets would be way too messy to justify a golden brown cake.

Ignore for a moment whether you’d personally want to.  It just seems like something that would be trendy if possible.  Maybe pre-recession trendy, cause that much butter isn’t cheap, but trendy along high meets low comfort food lines. Or something up Paula Deen’s alley.

Answer:

Whether you can deep fry with a fat is dependent on the smoke point – above which an fat/oil becomes unusable.  According to Wikipedia and Google books version of What Einstein told his cook, deep frying requires fat at a temperature of 345–375 °F.  Without a lot of care, the temperature may reach 400 °F.

Regular butter, smoke point = 350 °F – no, too low
Your average clarified butter (butter w/ milk solids removed), smoke point = around 400 °F – tempting fate
Ghee (Indian clarified butter w/o any water), smoke point = 485 °F – deep fryable!

Other than cost, my best guess for why deep frying with ghee isn’t the rage is that a lot of the buttery taste is in the butter fat.  Ghee has a unique taste of its own though, would be interesting…

Also, in my research found the fantastic Cooking for Engineers website.  Worth checking out.

This book looks pretty interesting too: