Is there such a factor as a brand new recipe? This zesty salad of watercress topped with anchovy fillets and croutons might match the invoice. I created it at some point once I’d been to the market and had a bunch of recent 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 net afterwards in the hunt for the same 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 bunch of hundreds of years in the past, or presumably nicely earlier than — suppose combined berries or oysters on the half shell. In case you look into historical historical past, opinions fluctuate broadly on what might have been the primary meals shared in widespread 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 could have been gathered, not cooked.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her fascinating e book The Previous Method, describes the virtues of the ostrich egg: ‘This handy merchandise is first a meal after which a water bottle’. It will have taken many millennia for folks to go from consuming a uncooked ostrich egg to creating an omelet, however when someone lastly was impressed to scramble the egg and cook dinner it, or extra possible did so by chance, this discovery would have been communicated and handed alongside.
Nearly each dish we put together as of late 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. Every so often a brand new recipe comes alongside, as an example Caesar salad, which was invented in 1924 by an Italian-American chef at his restaurant in Tijuana and is now common on either side of the Atlantic.
However it’s uncommon to discover a really unique recipe. Which is why I used to be all of the extra delighted to (apparently) invent the watercress-anchovy-crouton mixture. It makes a stunning lunch, accompanied by crusty bread and a full-bodied purple. You possibly can comply with up with cheese and a light-weight dessert — combined berries, for instance — to make a balanced meal excellent for spring.
Comfortable cooking.
