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Watercress Salad
Take plenty fresh young sprigs of watercress, wash and dry them thoroughly, put them lightly in dish, add 3 sliced shallots. Pour over them dressing made with 3 parts melted Crisco and 1 of lemon juice or vinegar. Garnish with tufts scraped horseradish.
A plain wilted-style salad from a Crisco promotional cookbook, and the one line that needs rethinking is the dressing fat.
- Use oil, not melted shorteningMelted Crisco sets solid the moment it touches cold, wet greens, leaving white flecks and a waxy mouthfeel. Any neutral oil at the same 3-to-1 ratio gives what the recipe was reaching for; olive oil is closer still to a dressing you would want to eat.
- The 3-to-1 ratioThree parts fat to one part lemon juice or vinegar is a standard vinaigrette proportion and needs no adjustment. Season with salt and pepper, which the original omits entirely.
- Dry the cress properly"Wash and dry them thoroughly" is the hinge. Water clinging to the leaves keeps the dressing from adhering and dilutes the acid, so spin or towel the sprigs until they are genuinely dry.
- Three shallots is a lotSliced raw shallot is assertive. Three whole ones will dominate a bowl of cress for most modern palates; one or two, sliced paper-thin, is closer to balance. Steeping the slices in the lemon juice for ten minutes before whisking in the oil takes the harsh edge off.
- Scraped horseradishThis means fresh root, peeled and scraped into shreds with a knife or shaved on a grater, not jarred prepared horseradish in vinegar and cream. If only the jarred kind is available, drain it well before making the "tufts."
- Dress at the last minuteWatercress collapses quickly under acid and salt. Pour the dressing over as the dish goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities beyond 'plenty' of sprigs; a generous bunch or two of watercress, dressed as written, would serve roughly four as a side salad.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company had launched in 1911; nearly every recipe in the book finds some use for it, which is why a green salad here is dressed with melted fat rather than oil. Watercress itself long predates the marketing: it grows wild in cold running streams, was sold by the bunch on British and American city streets through the nineteenth century, and was valued as a spring green precisely because it appeared before cultivated salad crops. Pairing it with shallot and horseradish plays peppery against peppery, both the cress and the root owing their bite to mustard-family compounds released when the tissue is cut or scraped.