Egg Mayonnaise and Cress

Cress in a punnet. Eggs in a bowl. This is the most British lunch I know how to make, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

There is nothing clever about egg mayonnaise. That's its virtue. You boil eggs, you mash them with a fork, you stir through enough mayonnaise to make them rich and enough mustard to make them interesting, and you pile cress on top until it looks like a small green hedge. It takes ten minutes. It feeds you properly. It tastes like a Tuesday afternoon in a kitchen where someone is paying attention.

I come back to this whenever the fridge is bare and the shops feel like too much effort. Four eggs, a jar of mayonnaise, a punnet of cress from the corner shop. We're only making lunch. But a good egg mayonnaise, made with decent eggs and real attention to the seasoning, is a quietly splendid thing. I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: eggs, mustard, cress, Wednesday. That was enough to bring it all back.

The cress matters more than you think. Without it, you have egg mayonnaise, pleasant and pale. With it, you have something that bites back, the peppery sharpness cutting through all that richness like a sharp word in a quiet room. Buy it in the punnet. Snip it with scissors. Be generous.