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Watercress Salad
Select three bunches of fresh watercress, pare off the stalks, clean, dry in a cloth, place in a salad-bowl, seasoning with one-half pinch of salt, a little pepper, and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar; mix thoroughly, and serve. Watercress salad requires no oil.
A four-line salad whose only real decision is made for you: no oil. The points below are mostly about handling the cress and about that one instruction.
- The hinge: no oilOscar means it. Watercress has enough pepper and body to carry straight vinegar, and oil coats the leaf and mutes the mustard heat. If you find it too sharp, use a milder vinegar rather than adding oil.
- Three bunchesBunch size varies, so judge by volume rather than count; three bunches of trimmed cress makes a modest side salad.
- "Pare off the stalks"Take off the thick lower stems, which are woody and stringy, and keep the tender upper sprigs and leaves. Snapping rather than cutting tells you where the stem turns fibrous.
- Drying mattersA cloth, or a salad spinner, is not optional here. Water clinging to the leaves dilutes two tablespoons of vinegar to nothing and the salad tastes of neither.
- "Half a pinch"Oscar uses the pinch as a measure throughout the book. Read it as a small pinch of salt for this quantity, added at the last moment so the leaves do not weep.
- Which vinegarThe recipe specifies only 'vinegar'. A wine or cider vinegar suits the cress; distilled white is harsher.
- Dress at the tableWatercress wilts quickly once dressed. Mix and serve, as written, rather than tossing it in advance.
- Wash the cress properlyCress sold loose or foraged from running water should be washed in several changes of cold water. Packaged, hydroponically grown cress needs only a rinse.
Watercress was one of the great cheap greens of the nineteenth-century city, sold from baskets in the street long before it reached hotel dining rooms, and it kept a reputation as a spring tonic and blood purifier well into Oscar's day. Its place in The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf looks functional rather than fashionable, though quite how such a salad was meant to be served in the grand hotel service of the 1890s the book does not say.