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Cress Salad
Pick over the leaves of the water-cress carefully, removing all bruised or wilted ones, and with the fingers break into two-inch lengths. Lay the cress in a salad bowl, chop one young spring onion very fine, strew it over the cress, add a French dressing, and serve.
A three-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the condition of the cress and the moment the dressing goes on. Nothing here needs modernising except the assumptions the original leaves unstated.
- French dressing, as this book means itIn books of this period "French dressing" usually means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper mixed fresh, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar; some period versions do add mustard. Figure about 3 tablespoons oil to 1 tablespoon wine vinegar for a large bunch of cress.
- Dress at the tableWatercress leaves are thin and collapse within a few minutes of meeting acid. Pour the dressing on immediately before it goes out, and toss lightly rather than stirring.
- Dry the cress completelyThe recipe says nothing about washing, but the cress will need it. Water clinging to the leaves thins the dressing and keeps it from coating; spin or blot until the leaves are dry.
- Wild-gathered cressCress taken from open streams and ditches can carry liver fluke and whatever is upstream of it. Buy cultivated watercress, or use hydroponic cress from a bag.
- The spring onionA "young spring onion" is a scallion, white and pale green parts only, sliced as finely as you can manage. One is enough — the point is a thread of sharpness under the peppery cress, not an onion salad.
- Breaking, not cuttingThe direction to break the cress with the fingers is worth following. A knife bruises the hollow stems and they weep and darken.
- YieldOne good bunch of watercress, about 4 oz trimmed, serves three or four as a side salad. Salads of this kind were commonly served alongside roast meat or game, though the recipe itself says nothing about how it should be served.
Watercress was one of the cheapest green things in a nineteenth-century city. It grew in managed beds fed by clear springs — the Kentish and Hampshire beds supplied London, increasingly by rail as the century went on — and was hawked in the streets by the bunch, eaten raw with bread by people who could afford little else, and at the same time served beside roast beef and game birds in the houses that could afford everything. Its peppery bite comes from the same mustard-oil compounds found in horseradish and rocket. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book to the same audience of American housekeepers who bought those patterns, and salads like this one — three ingredients, no cooking, assembled at the last minute — belong to a period when the plain green salad with a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing was being promoted as a lighter, French-influenced alternative to heavier boiled dressings.