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CRESS SAUCE (for Fish and Poultry)
Wash some cress carefully. Pick it from the stalks, and boil it for about ten minutes. Drain it, mince it very finely, and stir it into a little melted butter. Serve in a tureen. Sufficient, a handful of cress for half a pint of sauce. Cost, 6d. per pint.
A simple green sauce, but the whole thing turns on one phrase that no longer means what it says.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian and Edwardian English kitchens melted butter meant a white sauce made from butter, flour and water or milk — roughly a roux thinned to pouring consistency, the standard English fish sauce. Simply melting butter in a pan will give you a greasy pool of chopped cress rather than a sauce.
- Which cressCassell's would have expected either watercress or garden cress (the peppery seedling sold today as "cress" in punnets). Watercress gives a rounder, more mineral flavour and holds up to boiling; garden cress is sharper and collapses faster.
- Quantity"A handful" for half a pint is not precise, but in practice reckon on about 2 oz (60 g) of picked leaves for 10 fl oz of sauce — a generous bunch of watercress, or one large supermarket packet.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That serves four to six alongside a whole fish or a boiled fowl.
- Ten minutes is too longBoiled that hard, cress goes olive-drab and loses its pepper. Two to three minutes in well-salted water is enough to set the colour and soften the leaf; refresh in cold water if you want to keep it bright.
- Squeeze before mincingDrained cress still holds a surprising amount of water, which will thin the sauce and dull it. Press it firmly in a sieve or wring it in a cloth before chopping.
- Add the cress at the endStir the minced cress into the finished sauce off the heat, or hold it at the barest simmer. Prolonged cooking in the sauce turns the green grey and flattens the flavour.
- ServingA tureen means the sauce goes to table separately and is spooned over. It suits poached salmon, turbot, boiled chicken and, if you want, hot ham; a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of cream is a reasonable modern liberty.
Cress sauces belong to the long English habit of serving a sharp green against plain boiled protein — the same logic that gives us mint with lamb and sorrel with fish. Watercress was one of the great cheap urban greens of nineteenth-century Britain, grown commercially in the chalk streams of Hampshire and the south-east and carried into London by rail in the early morning, where it was hawked by the bunch and eaten by the poor, often with nothing but bread and butter. The costing of sixpence a pint suggests an inexpensive sauce. The recipe's brevity assumes a working cook already knew what "melted butter" meant.