Home › The Principles of Cookery › Water-Cress Salad
Water-Cress Salad
Gather the water-cress when young, cleanse it thoroughly in salt and water, and serve as fresh as possible. Place it in a bowl, either alone or mixed with other salad plants, and toss it lightly in a simple salad sauce. When served at breakfast, water-cress is best sent to table as it is, fresh and crisp.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but the instructions carry a few assumptions worth unpacking — chiefly about where the cress came from and what "a simple salad sauce" meant to a Victorian kitchen.
- Wild cress is the one real caveatWatercress gathered from streams and ditches, as this entry assumes, can carry the encysted larvae of liver fluke picked up from grazing land upstream. Rinsing in salt and water does not destroy them. Cultivated watercress, grown in controlled spring water and sold bagged or bunched, carries no such risk and is what to buy.
- "Cleanse in salt and water"The recipe gives no quantity. A modern working ratio is roughly a tablespoon of salt to a litre of cold water, swirled and the cress lifted out rather than poured off, so grit and any small aquatic snails sink and stay behind; change the water once or twice more. Nineteenth-century books commonly recommended salted water for greens gathered wild, and dislodging insects may well have been part of the point, though this entry does not say so.
- Dry it properlyCress holds water in the leaf axils and will dilute any dressing to nothing. Spin or shake it dry and roll it in a cloth before it goes anywhere near oil and vinegar.
- "A simple salad sauce"The phrase points to a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing of the kind period cookery books give under salad sauce or French dressing: commonly something like three parts salad oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. Dress at the last possible moment -- cress wilts quickly once oiled.
- "Young" cressThe instruction points to small leaves and thin stems. Older watercress turns hot and coarse and the stems go stringy; pick the thicker stalks out and keep the tender sprigs.
- The breakfast versionSent to table undressed. Watercress with bread and butter is the pairing usually recorded for the period; cold meat or boiled eggs are a modern suggestion. Twenty minutes in ice water beforehand will crisp it noticeably.
- YieldThe entry gives no quantity. As a rough guide, two generous bunches, trimmed, will dress a side salad for about four.
Watercress was a cheap green in Victorian Britain: grown commercially in the chalk-fed beds of Hampshire and Kent, it went up to London by early train and was hawked in the streets at dawn, and it was eaten at breakfast. Henry Mayhew's mid-century surveys of London street sellers record cress girls working the markets before most households were awake, and the bread-and-butter sandwich built around it was a staple of the poor. By the time Cassell's was compiled the plant had also become respectable as a garnish for roast game and grilled meat, and it earned an entry among the salad plants. The entry's insistence on freshness is practical rather than fussy: cress cut in the morning is limp by evening, which is why the trade ran on speed and why the book tells you to serve it as nearly as possible as it was picked.