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Watercress Greens

A boiled watercress dish seasoned with salt and butter, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and butter work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 842 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Watercress Greens

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Carefully wash the watercress greens thoroughly.

Cook

  1. Boil salted water in a kettle.

  2. Add the greens and cook for 1 hour or until tender.

  3. Remove from the kettle and press out all the water.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a little butter and more salt if needed.

  2. Serve very hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Watercress + buttertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Watercress greens
Provide the main body of the dish, softening into a tender, leafy texture when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat and a rich, smooth mouthfeel to the cooked greens.

The step that matters

Press out all the water. Cooked greens hold a lot of water, which dilutes flavor and makes the dish watery. Squeezing it out concentrates the taste and lets the butter coat the leaves properly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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