Home › Recipes › Water Cress and Apple Salad
Water Cress and Apple Salad
Water cress, sour apples, French dressing.
Have very clean and green water cress, and sour apples cut into slices. When ready to serve cover with a French dressing. Pepper water cresses are prepared the same.
A three-ingredient salad written in the shorthand of its day, which assumes you already know what French dressing is and how much cress to buy. The two things worth settling are the dressing and the timing.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn American cookbooks of this period, French dressing is simply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, mixed just before serving; the proportions vary from source to source, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet, orange, bottled product that later took the name.
- Sour applesTart cooking-and-eating apples: Granny Smith, Newtown Pippin, Bramley if you can get it. A sweet modern apple such as Gala or Fuji leaves the salad flat, since the acid in the apple is doing half the work of the dressing.
- Slice late, or acidulateCut apple browns within minutes. Slice it thin just before dressing, or toss the slices in a little lemon juice or some of the vinegar from the dressing while you wash the cress.
- Dress at the tableDress just before serving -- The instruction to cover with dressing "when ready to serve" is the hinge. Dressed cress wilts and weeps well before other salad leaves, so leave it until the last moment.
- Pepper water cressProbably one of the peppery cresses sold under names like pepper cress or peppergrass (Lepidium species, including garden cress), sharper and drier than true watercress. Any peppery small leaf will stand in -- garden cress, upland or land cress (Barbarea verna, a different plant despite the shared name), even young mustard greens.
- Washing the cress"Very clean" carried more weight when cress might be gathered from open water rather than bought cultivated. Bunched or bagged cress needs only a cold rinse and a thorough dry; wet leaves refuse to take dressing.
- Proportions and yieldThe original gives none. A large bunch of watercress, roughly 4 oz trimmed, with two apples and about a third of a cup of dressing, serves four as a side.
Watercress was one of the cheapest green things in a nineteenth-century city — grown in beds fed by running water near London and, it is often said, near American cities such as Boston and New York, sold by the bunch on the street, and eaten raw at a time when raw vegetables were otherwise treated with suspicion. Its pairing with tart apple is generally associated with the wave of light "salad course" cookery that arrived in American middle-class kitchens in the closing decades of the century, when French service and French dressing became marks of a well-run table. The recipe's brevity is the point: books of this kind assumed the reader could already make a vinaigrette and needed only the idea, not the method.