Is there such a factor as a brand new recipe? This zesty salad of watercress topped with anchovy fillets and croutons could match the invoice. I created it sooner or later once I’d been to the market and had a bunch of contemporary watercress within the fridge. How was I impressed so as to add the anchovies and croutons, together with a drizzle of olive oil and some drops of lemon juice? Don’t know, however once I surfed the online afterwards seeking an analogous salad, I discovered none.
Cresson-anchois-croûtons / Watercress with anchovies and croutons
Recipes have been developed and shared since early people started utilizing fireplace for cooking, a whole lot of 1000’s of years in the past, or presumably nicely earlier than — assume blended berries or oysters on the half shell. In the event you look into historic historical past, opinions fluctuate broadly on what could have been the primary meals shared in frequent by our ancestors. Bread is talked about, however its invention got here lengthy after anatomically trendy people started farming. Honey is a candidate for the primary shared meals, however it might have been gathered, not cooked.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her fascinating guide The Previous Approach, describes the virtues of the ostrich egg: ‘This convenient merchandise is first a meal after which a water bottle’. It could have taken many millennia for folks to go from consuming a uncooked ostrich egg to creating an omelet, however when any person lastly was impressed to scramble the egg and prepare dinner it, or extra possible did so by chance, this discovery would have been communicated and handed alongside.
Virtually each dish we put together lately is spinoff in a technique or one other. Once I write about French onion soup, for instance, I’m drawing on recipes developed over the centuries that I’ve tailored by trial and error to make the dish my very own. Ditto beef bourguinon or cheese soufflé. From time to time a brand new recipe comes alongside, for example Caesar salad, which was invented in 1924 by an Italian-American chef at his restaurant in Tijuana and is now in style on either side of the Atlantic.
However it’s uncommon to discover a actually authentic recipe. Which is why I used to be all of the extra delighted to (apparently) invent the watercress-anchovy-crouton mixture. It makes a beautiful lunch, accompanied by crusty bread and a full-bodied crimson. You could possibly observe up with cheese and a lightweight dessert — blended berries, for instance — to make a balanced meal excellent for spring.
Completely satisfied cooking.
