Potato Salad
Cut balls from raw potatoes, using a French vegetable cutter. There should be three cups. Cook potato balls with three slices of onion in boiling salted water until tender. Drain, chill and marinate with French Dressing, then cover with Boiled Dressing. Arrange in a mound on serving platter, surrounded with a border of nasturtium blossoms and leaves. Sprinkle top with finely chopped chives.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the two dressings are the point: an acid marinade first, a rich cooked dressing over the top. Everything else is knife work.
- The French vegetable cutterThis is a parisienne scoop or melon baller; such cutters came in a range of sizes. Three cups of balls means starting with a good few pounds of large, evenly shaped potatoes, since much is trimmed away; the trimmings are worth keeping for soup or mash.
- Choose a waxy potatoBalls cut from a floury baking potato will fray and break as they cook. Yukon Gold, red-skinned or other waxy varieties hold their shape and their edges.
- Cook them brieflySmall balls of raw potato are tender in 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which knocks them against each other. Test one early; overcooked, they collapse into the dressing.
- Marinate while still warmThe instruction to chill first is the one place modern practice differs. Warm potato absorbs vinaigrette; cold potato sheds it. Dress with the French dressing as soon as they are drained, then chill.
- Boiled dressingA period sauce of egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch and milk or cream, thickened over water and cooled. It is tangier and thinner than mayonnaise. A cookbook of this vintage assumes you have the recipe elsewhere in the book; a modern cooked salad dressing works in its place.
- French dressingIn 1913 this means plain oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, about three parts to one, whisked at the last moment. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing the name later came to mean.
- NasturtiumsBlossoms and leaves are edible and peppery, but use only flowers grown without pesticide, from a garden or sold as edible. Florist and garden-centre plants are routinely treated.
- YieldThree cups of potato balls plus dressings serves four to six as a side dish. Assemble the mound no more than an hour ahead so the boiled dressing does not slide.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when vegetable cutters were familiar equipment in an ambitious kitchen, and potatoes might be turned into spheres, olives or ovals. The two-dressing method is characteristic of American salad-making around the time commercial mayonnaise was first appearing: boiled dressing, thickened with egg and a little starch and sharpened with vinegar, was a common alternative to an emulsified mayonnaise. Nasturtiums as a garnish were a Victorian and Edwardian habit that lasted well into the twentieth century, prized because the flowers were showy, the plant grew in any neglected border, and both blossom and leaf carried a mustardy bite that suited a vinegared salad.