54 ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF OUR GARDEN VEGETABLES. 



CHAPTER VI. 



SALAD HEEBS. 



CHESS, BITTER. 



THIS, one of our commonest weeds in gardens, &c., is a small annual 

 member of the family Cruciferae, Cardamine hirsuta, L., and like 

 all members of this family it is perfectly wholesome. It has been 

 cultivated and improved, so is now used as a salad plant. It is allied 

 to the Cuckoo-flower or Lady's Smock (C. pratensis, L.). 



CRESS, GARDEN. 



No one appears to know for certain whence the garden cress 

 (Lepidium sativum of Linnaeus, who gives no locality) came. M. A. de 

 Candolle, after having exhausted his researches, thinks, by an 

 " assemblage of more or less doubtful facts [statements?], that the 

 plant is of Persian origin, whence it may have spread into the gardens 

 of India, Syria, Greece, and Egypt." 



Dioscorides said that the herb came from Babylon, and Pliny 

 adds that in Arabia it is said " to attain to a size that is quite mar- 

 vellous." It was cultivated for its seed, and used as a dried herb under 

 the name of Cardamon by the Greeks, and Nasturtium by the Romans 

 the former name on account of its good influence upon the heart 

 (kardia), and the latter because of its pungent odour, causing one to 

 make a wry face or " nose-twisting," as nasitortuum implies. Hence, 

 in the sixteenth century it had the name in France of Nasitort. 



It occurs in Middle Age vocabularies as Ccerse (tenth century), 

 Kersens or Cressens (thirteenth century), toncarsyn (i.e. town-carsyn) 

 (fourteenth century). 



Pliny records numerous complaints for which cress was used, as 

 it was valued only as a medicinal plant. 



In the sixteenth century we find it used as a salad plant. Thus 

 Dodoens observes : ' ' Cresses eaten in sallet with lettuce is of vertue 

 like to rocket and good amongst cold hearbes." We see here how it, 

 like many other plants, passed from purely medicinal to culinary 

 uses, as salads. Gerard also observes (1597) that " Galen saith that 

 cresses may bee eaten with bread veluti obsonium [i.e. as food 

 (especially fish) that was eaten with bread], as the Lowe Countrie- 

 men many times do, who commonly use to feede of cresses with bread 

 and butter. It is eaten with other sallade herbes as Tarragon and 

 Rocket; and for this cause it is chiefly sowen." 



It is not known when the seedlings were first eaten as now, arid 



