Home › Salads › Potato and Pimiento Salad
Potato and Pimiento Salad
1 tablespoonful Crisco 4 potatoes 2 hard-cooked eggs 1/2 can pimientos 1 tablespoonful chopped cucumber pickle 1 teaspoonful salt
Dressing (Tablespoonful Crisco)
1 tablespoonful Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls dry mustard 1 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 lemon 1/2 pint vinegar 2 eggs For salad. Boil potatoes and slice them, add Crisco and salt. Now chop pickles, eggs, and pimientoes and add them and set in cool place to chill. For dressing. Put vinegar into double boiler, add strained lemon juice, sugar, salt, mustard, then add Crisco and eggs well beaten. Cook until thick, then cool and use.
This is one of the skeleton entries in the book: an ingredient list with the method left to the cook's judgment. Everything below is about filling in the gaps sensibly.
- No method is givenThe original supplies quantities only. Boil the potatoes in their skins until a knife slides in easily, peel and dice while still warm, and dress them at once — warm potato absorbs dressing, cold potato repels it.
- The tablespoonful of CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. In a cold salad a spoonful of solid shortening sets into pale flecks; melt it and toss it through the hot potatoes, or substitute a tablespoon of neutral oil or the oil from the pimiento jar.
- PimientosCanned pimientos of the period came in small tins of several sizes, so 'half a can' is imprecise; roughly one whole jarred pimiento, or half a jar of the small ones sold now, is a reasonable reading. Drain well and dice; the packing liquid will thin any dressing you add.
- Cucumber pickleChopped fine, most likely a sweet or sour cucumber pickle rather than a dill spear, though the term covered both. A tablespoon is a seasoning quantity, meant to be tasted rather than seen.
- The dressing the list omitsA tablespoon of fat and a teaspoon of salt will not bind four potatoes. Boiled dressing and mayonnaise were the usual period choices; add two to three tablespoons of either, or a spoonful of vinegar with the fat, or the salad will read as dry.
- SaltA full teaspoon is right for four potatoes if it goes in with the fat while they are hot. Added at the end it sits on the surface and tastes sharp.
- EggsHard-cook by covering with cold water, bringing to a boil, then holding off the heat, covered, for about ten minutes. Chop one into the salad and slice the other over the top.
- YieldFour medium potatoes with two eggs gives four modest side servings.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had launched Crisco in 1911 and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a shortening that was neither butter nor lard. That is presumably why a tablespoon of it appears even in a cold potato salad. The pimientos are a period marker of their own. Canned pimientos, which are generally said to have been imported from Spain before being grown commercially in the American South in the early twentieth century, became a cheap way to put color into pale food, and they turn up in salads, sandwich fillings and the cheese spreads of the same decade. The clipped, method-free format here reflects a book organized around menus rather than technique: it assumed a reader who already knew how to boil a potato and needed only to be told what to buy.