Thinking about dinner and the lawn in April

I thought that April might have a few more recipes than the earlier months in Home Gardener's Cookbook (Marjorie Page Blanchard, 1974). After all, spring is officially underway at this point. No such luck, though. It takes plants a while to grow. So the April chapter features a basic dressing recipe meant for dandelion greens along with two recipes for watercress. The enthusiasm for watercress is a bit tempered, and I particularly liked the observation that "just the leaves for garnish tends to give the effect of a lot of grass clippings. Always use the stems for character."

For those who want watercress to play a bigger role in the meal than just last-minute garnish, there's a recipe for Green Baked Fish.

Cooks will presumably have to settle for grocery-store-tomatoes, though, as fresh ones are definitely not in season! (At least, not in the author's home base of Connecticut.)

And for those who want it to play a more supporting role without being mistaken for lawn clippings, there's Watercress Cream.

I can imagine cooks using this in recipes that called for white sauce (and sometimes it seems like half of all savory recipes called for white sauce back in the day-- unless cooks were just using a can of cream-of-something soup instead!), but serving it cold? Seems like that would be an even harder sell...

Maybe cooks counted on the joy of spring to make their families agreeable enough to eat whatever they put out? Or maybe they just liked sprinkling meals with greenery to subconsciously suggest it was time to start taking care of the lawn...