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Potato Salad (Boil and mash the potatoes)
Boil and mash the potatoes fine and smooth, and season well with butter, pepper, salt and a little cream. Use three hard-boiled eggs to each quart of potatoes. Chop the whites fine, and work the yellows smooth with mustard, a trifle of sugar, pepper and salt, according to taste, with only enough vinegar to moisten the whole. When thoroughly mixed, including the whites of the eggs, put a layer of the mashed potatoes in a flat-bottomed dish; drop the dressing in spots over the potatoes and so proceed until the whole is finished, with a layer of potatoes, nicely smoothed over the top, and so arranged that the salad will be crowning at the top. Then brown the whole in the oven and garnish.
This is a hot, baked potato salad built like a layered casserole rather than the cold, cubed salad the name now suggests. The original assumes you know how firm mashed potato should be and how brown the top should get, so a few numbers help.
- A quart of potatoesThe measure appears to be by volume of cooked, mashed potato rather than raw weight, though the recipe does not say so outright. A quart of mash is somewhere in the region of 2 lb, so three eggs to roughly that quantity is the working ratio.
- Keep the mash stiffButter and "a little cream" should stop well short of a soft, piped mash. A slack mixture will not hold the layers or the domed top the recipe asks for, and it weeps in the oven.
- The mustardThis may well be dry mustard powder worked into the yolks, though prepared mustard was also common and the recipe does not specify. If you use prepared mustard, cut the vinegar to allow for the liquid already in it.
- Only enough vinegar to moistenThis is the hinge. The yolk dressing should be a thick paste that can be dropped in spots, not a pourable vinaigrette. Too much vinegar and it runs out through the potato instead of staying in pockets.
- Browning the wholeThe recipe says only "brown in the oven" and gives no temperature or time. A hot oven, or a few minutes under the broiler if the mixture is still warm from assembly, will do it; go by the colour of the top rather than by the clock. Dot the surface with butter first or the top dries rather than colours.
- GarnishThe recipe does not say what with; parsley or watercress suits it. Note that all the egg white is chopped into the dressing, so none is left over unless you deliberately hold some back. Add the garnish after baking.
- Yield and servingA quart of potatoes with three eggs will serve about four to six as a side. Serve it hot or just warm.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "salad" far more loosely than we do, and this is a hot, baked dish rather than the cold, mayonnaise-bound salad the name now suggests.