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Watercress and Cucumber Salad
Prepare watercress and add one cucumber, pared, chilled, and cut in one-half inch dice. Serve with French Dressing.
A two-line salad that assumes you already know Farmer's standing instructions for cress and for French dressing. The only real technique is keeping both elements cold and dressing them at the last possible moment.
- "Prepare watercress"In practice this means picking over the bunch, discarding coarse stems and yellowed leaves, washing in several changes of cold water, and drying it. Wet cress will not hold dressing; a salad spinner does in seconds what a cloth once did.
- The cucumberMarket cucumbers of this period were commonly thick-skinned and seedy, which is likely why the recipe specifies pared. An English or Persian cucumber needs no peeling and no seeding, and half-inch dice from one of those is right for a bunch of cress.
- "Chilled" is an instruction, not a suggestionFarmer elsewhere has cucumbers stand in ice water. Diced cucumber held 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator, or briefly in ice water and then drained dry, stays crisp against the peppery cress instead of weeping into the dressing.
- French Dressing, as this book means itNot a bottled orange emulsion. Farmer's version is roughly two parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, mixed or shaken to combine; about 2 tablespoons oil to 1 tablespoon vinegar dresses this quantity.
- Dress at the tableWatercress leaves collapse within a few minutes of meeting acid and salt. Combine, toss, and serve immediately, or bring the dressing separately.
- YieldOne bunch of watercress and one cucumber will give roughly four small side salads; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Watercress is often said to have reached American tables first as a garnish before it became a salad in its own right, and by the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School it was a common market green in the Northeast, grown in running water in beds near cities and sold in tied bunches. Salads of this kind, dressed with nothing more than oil, vinegar and seasoning, may mark a shift in late nineteenth-century American cooking away from heavier boiled dressings and gelatine moulds, though such simply dressed salads sit alongside them in the same section. The pairing itself is old and largely self-explanatory: a sharp, mustard-family green against the coolest thing in the garden, with the cucumber's paring and chilling doing the work that modern breeding has since done for us.