Slice cold boiled potatoes very thin and mix with chopped celery and onion; season with salt and pepper. Then mix the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs with 1 tablespoonful of olive-oil. Add to the salad with 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve.
January 29 — No. 29
Belgian
A terse late-Victorian potato salad in the Continental style, dressed with an egg-yolk emulsion rather than mayonnaise. The original gives no quantity of potatoes at all, so the proportions are yours to judge.
- QuantitiesNo weight of potatoes is stated. The dressing as written — 2 yolks, 1 tablespoon oil, 2 tablespoons vinegar — is a small amount; taken as a guide it would dress something in the region of a pound of cooked potatoes, but the proportion is a matter of judgement and you may want more oil.
- Mash the yolks properlyThis is the hinge. Push the hard-boiled yolks through a sieve or crush them to a paste with the back of a spoon, then work in the oil drop by drop before the vinegar goes near them. Tipped in whole, they stay as crumbs and the salad reads as dry.
- The dressing is sharpTwo parts vinegar to one part oil is the reverse of modern practice. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it; if you want the acid tamed, add oil rather than cutting the vinegar, which is what carries the seasoning here.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, which reads as an assumption that they are already cooked and to hand. Boiled potatoes absorb a vinegar dressing better while still warm, so if you are cooking specially, dress them at once and cool afterwards.
- Potato typeUse a waxy variety — Charlotte, fingerling — so the very thin slices hold together when turned. Floury baking potatoes collapse into paste.
- Celery and onionTake the inner celery ribs and their leaves; the outer stalks are too fibrous for raw slicing. A mild onion, or the white of spring onions, keeps the raw bite from dominating a salad this plain.
- Leftover whitesThe whites are unused. Chop them and fold them in with the parsley if you would rather not waste them.
The book belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: a dish a day, each tagged with a nationality, so a middle-class cook could produce novelty without a new cookbook. The nationality is often a loose label, and "Belgian" here mainly signals the egg-yolk-and-vinegar dressing rather than mayonnaise, a treatment common across northern France and the Low Countries and closely related to the German and Alsatian habit of dressing potatoes with vinegar and oil while still warm. Potato salad of this kind was a practical dish in a period when boiled potatoes were cooked in quantity and rarely thrown away, and the sieved hard-boiled yolk may well have helped the dressing hold together.