Watercress

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Funny how our disregard for what's just around us can bring us surprises.

Take the case of the watercress, for example, which we have until the recent years, disregarded as just a weed, ordinary and useless, instead of the premium salad and such ingredient that it really is.

Good Friend J, a top news executive in a TV network, said she grew up believing she was different because she was eating watercress from the wok of her grandfather, who was pure Chinese. I thought we were the only family in town eating grass, and I've always hidden that part as one of our culinary secrets, she said, until she heard a famous personality was serving this as salad. So deep must have been her watercress scars, she laughingly related, she immediately felt a kinship with this watercress salad-serving personality, as if they were part of some untold conspiracy.

Another friend J, upon seeing watercress salad served as the side dish of his sandwich, quipped: “Damo ni sa kilid kalog sa balay (These grow abundantly on the sides of the canal in the house)”

Really now. While watercress grows locally, I don't think there is a robust eating tradition for it hereabouts. Proof is, it doesn't have a name in the vernacular, at least none that I could find. I've shown it to some old folks in the countryside, and most of them reacted with surprise: Nakaon na gali? (Oh, that is edible?)”

Watercress is a very European food, Good Friend P, who works in a German bank said. It is used mostly for salads and garnishing. With a peppery kick in its flavor, it is best used to waken up the palate to start the meal or clean it between courses.

In Baguio over the weekend, I saw how versatile this weed is on the dining table. I found watercress used as a co-equal to meat in the patatim of Rosebowl: the blanched leaves and young stems, limp but slightly crunchy, tasted nicely eaten with the soft fatty pork. I gathered from the public market vendors in that mountain city that watercress grows abundantly in Trinidad, and that their supplies come from there.

Over at Café by the Ruins, where locavore dishes are served, watercress accented its signature salad of greens with wild berries, strawberries, ripe mangoes and shrimps.

Good Friend L, a gastronome through and through, said one can also use watercress thus: boil chicken stock, put in beaten eggs while stirring it, and then just before taking it out of the fire, throw in the young stems and leaves.

These three, at the very least, should tell us how versatile these weeds from our kalogs can become.

I've always believed we have, to this day, underused our local culinary resources, swamped as we have been with imported produce. Most often, we are introduced to these resources only when they are first presented to us as imported, or coming from different places. The manumbok, blue marlin, for example was just a common fish in the deep south, until it got served as steak in urban restaurants.

The basil, which got to us as an important leaf for pasta, is in fact, also growing in our wilds and is used as an herbal cure. Its local name: kalo-oy.

We can go on and on with more examples and it should provoke us into asking: just how many edible leaves and even trees are there in our canals and wilds, still waiting to be discovered? And think how much they can alleviate hunger and poverty in our backyards.*

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