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Water-Cress and Walnut Salad
Crack walnuts and remove their meats as nearly as possible in unbroken halves. Squeeze over them the juice of one lemon, and leave them for several hours. Just before dinner pick over one full pint of watercress, wash it carefully and drain it on a napkin. At the last moment drench the cress with French dressing, spread the nuts over it, give them also a generous sprinkling of the dressing, and serve.
A three-ingredient salad that depends almost entirely on timing and on dry greens. Two details in the original do the real work: the long lemon soak on the nuts, and the instruction to dress at the last moment.
- The hinge: dress at the tableWatercress collapses within minutes of meeting vinaigrette. Have the cress, the nuts and the dressing ready separately and combine them only as the plates go out.
- A full pint of cressMeasured loosely packed, that is roughly 2 to 3 ounces of leaves and tender stems, enough for four small side salads. Pick off the thick lower stalks, which are stringy.
- Drying the greens"Drain it on a napkin" means what a salad spinner now does. Wet leaves dilute the dressing and keep it from clinging, so get the cress genuinely dry.
- The lemon soakSeveral hours in lemon juice may take the edge off the walnuts' tannic bitterness. Two hours is enough if you are pressed; drain them before they go on the salad.
- Shelled walnutsCracking your own gives the unbroken halves the recipe wants, but bagged walnut halves work. Taste them first, as walnut oil goes rancid quickly; toasting briefly and cooling revives dull nuts.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, not the sweet orange bottled product sold under that name today. Three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper, is a common proportion of the era.
- ServingServes four as a first course or alongside roast poultry or game. A little crumbled blue cheese is a common modern addition, though it is not in the original.
Watercress was a cheap, widely available green in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, grown in running water near cities and sold in bunches by street hawkers well into the era this book was written for. Salads of this kind, built on a single green with nuts or fruit and a plain vinaigrette, were often served after the roast as a light course rather than as a starter. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, also issued cook books aimed at middle-class housekeepers, and salads of uncooked greens were growing in popularity in a cuisine that had earlier treated them with some suspicion.