Cold Poached Egg Salad with Watercress Sauce

This is a kind of variation on the egg mayonnaise theme, but I think extremely attractive and even more delicious.

Serves 3 as a main course or 6 as a starter

This recipe is taken from Delia Smith’s Summer Collection

Cold Poached Egg Salad with Watercress Sauce

Ingredients
6 large fresh eggs
For the watercress sauce:
4 oz (110 g) watercress, dried on kitchen paper
2 large eggs
1 level teaspoon salt
1 clove garlic
1 rounded teaspoon mustard powder
10 fl oz (275 ml) groundnut oil
2 teaspoons wine vinegar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
freshly milled black pepper
To serve:
mixed green leaf salad or any other salad leaves, thinly sliced

Method

Begin by poaching the eggs: fill a frying pan with water to a depth of approximately 1½ inches (4 cm), then heat it up to a temperature just sufficient to keep the water at a bare simmer. Then break the eggs, two at a time, into the simmering water and let them cook for 3 minutes or so. As soon as they're cooked to your liking, use a draining spoon to lift them from the water and transfer them to a bowl of cold water. Then cook the remaining eggs, and leave them in the cold water while you prepare the sauce.

Separate off the watercress leaves and discard the stalks. Now break the 2 eggs into the goblet of a food processor or blender, add the salt, garlic, mustard powder and a few twists of freshly milled black pepper, then switch on to blend these together. Now pour the oil in a thin trickle through the hole in the top with the machine still switched on. When all the oil is in, add the vinegar, lemon juice and watercress leaves, then blend again until the sauce takes on a lovely speckled green colour.

To serve, arrange thinly sliced salad leaves round the edges of your serving plates to form a border, then arrange 1 or 2 eggs in the centre and spoon the sauce over and around them. Serve with crusty wholemeal bread.

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