Crisp on the outside, creamy on the inside, these fritters are perfect with a peppery salad
Growing up in England in the 80s, my mum used to drive to a village in Hertfordshire called Whitwell to buy bunches of watercress from Wells farm. We had a Renault 5 with a slippery back seat and lively suspension, so we would bounce as we crossed a humpback bridge to get to the farm. Through the car window, my brother, sister and I, sticky and argumentative, would often see the backs of two of the Sansom brothers as they picked watercress from emerald-green waterbeds that had been cultivated for more than 200 years. It was farms like Wells that grew some of the millions of bunches that were carted up to London in the 1800s and 1900s. In her essay about the watercress girls, Angela Clutton writes about how it was loved by the wealthy, but needed by workers, who ate it for breakfast in sandwiches, and the poor, who ate it with nothing. She also writes about the young watercress girls and their wicker baskets of green and their early-morning cries of “Wo-orter-crease, wo-orter-crease”.
Back home in the 80s, Dad would stuff watercress in his sandwiches, its soft leaves and succulent stems pungent with mustard oils, making it both a salad and a seasoning as good as mustard. It was one of the first things I remember teaching myself to eat, seeing the peppery heat as a challenge that would eventually give pleasure. Mum used to make watercress and potato soup, pan after pan of Jane Grigson’s potage de santé (soup of health) which, despite its colour and name, we absolutely loved with bread and butter.
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