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German Mode of Cooking Watercress
Wash a quantity of watercress and chop it slightly; put two ounces of butter in a stewpan with two tablespoonfuls of flour and stir over the fire until well-browned, then pour in gradually one-half pint of water and keep on stirring over the fire until boiling. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, a little grated nutmeg and sufficient lemon juice or vinegar to give it an agreeable acidity. Put in the watercress, boil up, then turn it into a dish, and serve as a vegetable.
A brown-roux sauce with wilted watercress folded in at the last moment. The only difficult part is knowing when to stop cooking the greens.
- How much watercress"A quantity" is no guide. For a half pint of sauce, count on 3 or 4 large supermarket bunches, roughly 12 oz to 1 lb untrimmed, which will collapse to very little. Trim the coarse lower stems; the leaves and tender upper stems are what you want.
- MeasuresTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. Half a pint of water is one cup in American measure, which is what Oscar used. A stewpan is simply a wide saucepan.
- The hinge: brown the roux, then stopButter and flour "well-browned" means a true braune Mehlschwitze, cooked to the color of a hazelnut shell, which is where the dish gets its flavor. Butter solids scorch quickly at that stage, so keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; a burnt roux is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Sauce consistencyOne cup of liquid to 2 tablespoons of flour gives roughly a medium sauce, though the generous 2 ounces of butter makes it rich. Browned flour thickens less than raw flour, so if it still sets up stiffer than you want, thin it with a few tablespoons more water or with stock.
- "Boil up" is seconds, not minutesWatercress wilts almost on contact with the hot sauce. Fold it in, let the pan return to a boil, and take it off. Held longer it turns olive-drab and loses the peppery bite that is the whole point of the vegetable.
- Acid lastAcid -- The recipe seasons the sauce with lemon juice or vinegar before the cress goes in; if you prefer, add it off the heat instead, tasting as you go and starting with about 2 teaspoons. Prolonged boiling with acid dulls the green colour.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. "A little" here means a few scrapes for a cup of sauce, in the German manner used with spinach and other greens.
- YieldServes 4 as a side dish, spooned beside roast or boiled meat rather than heaped in a bowl.
Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) grows in cold running water and was long gathered wild before being cultivated in beds; in German cooking it appears as Brunnenkresse, from Brunnen, a well or spring, and was treated much as spinach was, dressed in a browned flour-and-butter sauce sharpened with vinegar and warmed with nutmeg. That browned roux, the braune Mehlschwitze, is what makes the dish "German mode" rather than simply boiled greens. Oscar Tschirky, of the Waldorf, assembled his 1896 book as a working compendium rather than a personal manifesto, and it is full of such national treatments set side by side.