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Watercress has been gathered from the wild for thousands of years, providing a source of essential vitamins and iron long before these qualities were isolated and recognised. Watercress is one of those foods that are so overtly good for you that it really doesn’t take a scientist to explain it. You can see it in the vibrant green colour and taste it in the punchy flavour: this is a loaded vegetable.

It has traditionally been picked from flowing streams and ditches and can be found all year round, except that it doesn’t really like extremes of temperature and often disappears temporarily during the coldest part of winter and the hottest summer months.

Because the plant will absorb any water-borne pollutants, especially agricultural slurry washing off nearby fields, I am not advocating the consumption of wild watercress. Liver fluke is a particular worry as it seems to thrive in watercress, and can pass to humans. While the idyllic image of collecting wild cress is attractive, it is essential that you really know the source and are certain that the water in which the cress grows is free from any pollution. For most of us, that means it is simply not a good idea to eat watercress from the wild. Similarly, if you are buying watercress from a market stall, do make sure you can trust the source.

Most watercress is now commercially grown in carefully controlled flowing water beds, an industry that already goes back over two hundred years. The watercress we use in Paradiso comes from a source that is somewhere between the wild and controlled. It is grown in a deep pond in the bend of a stream on a small vegetable farm in West Cork. The pond was created in the late 1970s by a number of very enlightened blow-ins who began their lives here as self-sufficiency advocates, moved on to trading and bartering amongst themselves, and eventually took the bold step of selling excess produce to the public. Fatefully, they formed a co-op. From there it was the usual slide towards outbreaks of feuding, accusations of capitalism, fascism and plain old fraud. The good ones are still round and about, still growing and sometimes selling great food. Luckily the stream and the cress survived not only the fall-out, but numerous changes of ownership of the property that the stream flows through. Each time the farm changes hands, I fear for the future of our watercress supply.

Somehow it’s not surprising that research is well advanced on the attributes of watercress that are believed to be cancer inhibitors. This is a very modern take on a plant that has been seen as a miracle for as long as humans have been eating it. Way back as far as Greek and Roman times, and continuously through the centuries since, watercress has been revered for qualities beyond its simple nutritional content. At various times it has been credited with the powers of everything from curing freckles and hangovers to reversing baldness and restoring lost beauty; and it has been extolled as, among many other things, an aphrodisiac and an intellectual stimulant.

Whatever the validity of some of the more outrageous of these claims, there is definitely something to be said for the plant’s ability to stimulate the mind. In Ireland, it has a special place in the mixture of folklore, myth and history that makes up what we know of the lives of saints, sages and holy men. Monks were known to spend long periods living on watercress alone, or sometimes supplemented with a little bread. This wasn’t a case of self-flagellation but an attempt to stimulate their thinking powers. The combination of the plant’s cleansing and healing properties with its reputed effect on the brain would have been a powerful stimulant to those who set themselves apart in isolation to confront the great issues of mind and soul. Even if the effect were not purely scientific, the very deliberate act of putting yourself in that situation of‘taking to the watercress’ would surely sharpen and focus the mind. Whatever gets the work done, I say. And they certainly got some work done. The religious communities in Ireland have been credited with carrying the torch of civilisation during the Dark Ages. They took on the task of writing down as much as possible of European literature, even as the barbarians were destroying it, and later disseminating it back across the continent. Many of these communities were fiercely isolationist, putting themselves in seemingly uninhabitable places, like the Skellig rocks off the south-west coast, in order to have the physical freedom and safety as well as the sense of remove that were needed to carry out their visionary work.

Perhaps it’s just foodie wishful thinking, but I’d like to think that, although taking to the watercress was a form of fasting, it was done with such positive and specific purpose that these holy men would have enjoyed the stuff. Watercress is one of the most flavourful and easily digestible greens, so it certainly must have been better than if they had attached mind-enhancing properties to nettles or the like.

The taste of watercress is a pungent mix of mustard-like heat, an aromatic freshness and a slight bitterness. Some varieties of land cress are available, similar in appearance to their watery cousin but grown in soil, and the flavour is usually a much more direct hit of unadulterated heat with none of the subtleties of watercress. It is only in direct comparison that you really appreciate the exquisite and complex flavour of the original.

Watercress makes a great salad green, bringing a peppery vibrancy to any mix. It’s delicious with orange, fennel, the oily nuts like walnut and pecan, as well as pears and green apples. Blue cheese is fabulous with cress, as are soft mild cheeses, especially those made from goat’s or sheep’s milk. Despite all that, I actually cook it as often as I serve it raw, although cooking is probably not quite the right word. If you heat it for much more than a minute or so, you risk losing both the vivid colour and the full impact of the flavour. In risotto, pasta, sauces and even soups, I add the cress at the last second so it just warms through. Eaten as part of dishes such as these, you may not get enough to turn you into a seer, but it certainly adds a kick to your dinner.