Watercress

It was the turn of the 19th century when the water companies took the water; the eight springs that the Cantiaci Celts held sacred finally ran dry. The banks of rushes and water parsnip were replaced by concrete sidings. Watling Street’s ancient route was renamed the A2 and garnished with Travel Lodges and Marston’s pubs; traditional fayre and Sunday roasts for bored commuters. The deep history of the Kentish Thames estuary lands razed.  

Some hundred years before the river dried up William Bradbery commercialised the production of watercress on the Ebbsfleet - it quickly became the salad leaf of choice across London. The urban poor flocked to Fleet market (where Farringdon is now) to buy baskets of the leaves which they’d sell for pennies across the city. Watercress' peppery charm quickly won its admirers across the early Victorian social stratas. 

When I mentioned to my mum that I was writing this, she enthusiastically reminisced about brown bread, butter and watercress sandwiches that she’d grown up eating in post war London. She went on to say she didn’t see watercress around any more (I did suggest she look in the bagged salad aisle of the supermarket) which made me wonder if the salad sandwiches of her youth were actually the last flourish of its pre-industrial cultivation. 

Watercress is a member of the Brassicaceae, a semi-aquatic kin to cabbages and mustard leaves; a relationship which on first inspection seems odd. Watercress’ leaves and stems are soft and hollow as opposed to the tougher leafage of its cabbage brethren. However, on closer tasting it makes more sense: watercress’ trademark pepperiness is thanks to one of the isothiocyanates, the Brassicaceae’s sulphurous aromatic weapons. 

In her wonderful Longthroat Memoirs, Yemisi Aribisala talks movingly about pepperishness (rhymes with feverishness) and how, to her, it’s something more than just black peppercorns and chilli peppers. It's all the different chillies, peppers and their esoteric relations. The heat, the bite, the burn; uziza peppercorns swelling up in the bottom of soup; alligator peppers in coffee; uda pods with their fermented funk, peppery but with the kiff of sweaty blue cheese. It’s pepperish as an attitude; a way of approaching food rather than anything as simple as a single flavour. 

We see pepperishness in wine as well. It shows up in a host of different varieties: Pineau d’Aunis in the Loire, Schioppettino in Northern Italy, Gruner Veltliner in central Europe and the old Northern Rhone family of Mondeuse, Serine and Syrah. A rag bag of different colours, weights and flavours all united by a twist of the peppermill. 

It transpires that our peppery wines are peppery on account of a chemical called Rotundone, which rather like Yemisi’s pepperishness is only one of the many essential oils in peppers aromatic offering. It’s named for Asian nutgrass (Cyperus rotundus), but it’s a promiscuous little bugger, turning up in most of the Mediterranean’s bouquet garni, with rosemary, thyme, marjoram and basil all owing some of their aromatics to its peppery bite. 

I love rotundone in wine: it turns up in so many of my favourite reds that it might as well be considered a marker for wines I’m likely to buy. It’s the cracked black pepper that levens the crushed gariguette strawberries in Pineau d’Aunis, it’s the left hook to formic acid’s jab in McLaren Vale Shiraz and it’s Schioppettino staring down a plate of cacio e pepe, all chest out and taunting.

Instinctively I associate rotundone’s gruff burr with red wines. However, I find it most intriguing when it turns up in whites - Austria’s Danubian Gruners in particular. I love their majestic acidity, curious green apple-like herbaceous fruit, cool chalk stream limpidity and yes, all that cracked white pepper. 

It’s almost a cliche to tout their food friendliness but they really are the golden labrador of the wine list, gleefully playing with almost everything they’re put alongside; as happy with a set menu classic (fillet of seabass, herbed potatoes) as they are with easy home cooked favourites (the powerfully garlicked Caesar salad we make most summer Saturdays). Obviously, it would be ridiculous to imagine my mother getting stuck into Fred Loimer’s finest Gruners with her watercress sandwiches back in 1950s Ealing, but I’d like to imagine that Gran and Grandad Hall would have appreciated a glass. Peppery Gruner and watercress on brown.