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Watercress Salad
Carefully discard any stale leaves and neatly trim the stalks; wash well and thoroughly drain two good-sized bunches very fresh watercress; place in a salad bowl; season with thee tablespoons salad dressing. gently but quickly mix and immediately serve.
A three-line salad whose success rests entirely on dry leaves and last-minute dressing. Everything else is detail.
- Dress at the tableWatercress collapses within a few minutes of meeting oil and acid. Have the bowl, the leaves and the dressing ready separately and combine only as the plates go down; "gently but quickly" is the whole technique.
- "Salad dressing" hereThe book does not say what it means; in cookery of this period the term could cover either a simple oil-and-vinegar French dressing or a cooked, thicker dressing. If a French dressing is intended, something on the order of three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper is the usual reading. The recipe's three tablespoons for two bunches is enough; more will drown the leaves.
- Two good-sized bunchesA bunch has no standard weight, so treat this as a generous quantity for a small table rather than a fixed measure. Supermarket clamshell packs tend to be smaller than a greengrocer's bunch, so you may need several.
- TrimmingTake off the thick lower stems, which are stringy, but keep the tender upper stalks, which are said to be the more peppery part. Yellowed or limp leaves go in the bin rather than the bowl.
- Drying matters more than washingWater clinging to the leaves dilutes the dressing and makes it slide off. Spin the cress or roll it in a towel until genuinely dry, then chill it briefly to crisp it.
- SourceWild-gathered cress from open streams can carry liver fluke and should not be eaten raw. Use cultivated or bagged watercress; the recipe itself specifies only "very fresh watercress".
Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) was one of the cheapest green things in a Victorian and Edwardian city — grown commercially in the chalk-stream beds of southern England and around Paris, cut before dawn and sold by street criers as a breakfast food for the poor, eaten with bread and butter. It later climbed the table: hotel and restaurant kitchens used it as a common garnish for roast game and grilled meats, and a plain dressed cress salad was often served with roast duck or partridge. In the French service of the day, salade de cresson arrived after the roast rather than before it, dressed with nothing more elaborate than oil, vinegar and salt.