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English Walnut and Water Cress Salad
Two dozen English walnuts, two bunches water cress, French dressing. Crack the nuts, and take out the kernels with as little breaking as possible. Squeeze lemon juice over them and lay on a bed of cresses. Serve with a French dressing.
A three-ingredient salad that depends entirely on the quality of the nuts and the freshness of the cress. Two dozen walnuts in the shell yield roughly a cup of kernels.
- English walnutsThis is simply the common walnut, Juglans regia, so named in American books to distinguish it from the native black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Shelled halves work, but shell them yourself if you can — pre-shelled walnuts turn rancid quickly and taste bitter.
- Getting clean halvesCrack the nuts at the seam, working the point of a nutpick around the inner partition. Halves that have been soaked briefly in warm water come out more nearly whole, though they must be dried before dressing.
- Skins and bitternessMost of the bitterness in a walnut is in the papery brown skin. If the nuts are old, toast them a few minutes at 350F and rub them in a towel; the loosened skin comes away and the flavour sweetens.
- The lemon juiceThe acid cuts the oiliness of the kernels. The recipe has it squeezed over them straight after cracking, before they go on the cress, rather than added at the table.
- WatercressTwo bunches is about 6 to 8 ounces. Wash it in several changes of cold water, pick off the thick stems, and dry it thoroughly — cress holds water in its hollow stalks and will dilute the dressing. Buy cultivated cress rather than gathering wild, which can carry liver fluke from grazing land.
- French dressingIn a book of this period that means oil, vinegar or lemon, salt and pepper whisked or shaken together, in the region of three parts oil to one of acid — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name in America today.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number served; two dozen kernels and two bunches of cress would stretch to about four as a first course or alongside a roast. Dress it at the last moment; cress wilts quickly once it meets oil and salt.
Watercress was a familiar salad plant on American and British tables through the nineteenth century, helped along by the plant's reputation as a spring tonic and by its cultivation in clear running water near cities. Pairing it with walnuts is an old and sensible instinct — the peppery mustard oils in the cress read as a foil to the fat of the nut, the same logic behind walnut oil in a cress dressing. A book given over wholly to salads belongs to a period when the salad was moving from a plain accompaniment to a dish in its own right, and when American cooks were increasingly presented with the imported thin-shelled walnut alongside the native black walnut of the eastern woods.