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Potato Salad (Cut the potatoes in thin)
Cut the potatoes in thin slices, in dice or cubes, and soak three hours in a mixture of three parts vinegar to one part oil; make thick mayonnaise dressing, drain the potatoes and pour the dressing over the potatoes.
A terse late-Victorian supper-table formula that assumes a good deal of knowledge on the cook's part, including the fact that the potatoes are already boiled.
- The potatoes are cookedNothing here says to boil them; cooked potatoes are simply taken for granted, and cold boiled potatoes from an earlier meal would have served. Boil waxy potatoes in their skins until just tender, peel while warm, and slice.
- Dress them warmDressing them warm helps -- The recipe is silent on temperature, but warm potatoes take up vinegar and oil more readily than cold ones. If you are boiling them specially, pour the marinade over while they still have some heat and let them cool as they soak.
- That vinegar ratio is deliberateThree parts vinegar to one part oil is the reverse of a modern vinaigrette and will taste startlingly sharp on its own. It is meant as a pickling soak, not a finished dressing, and the mayonnaise added later carries the fat.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod cider and white wine vinegars varied in strength and were far less standardised than today's 5 percent bottled vinegar. Taste the soaking liquid and cut it with a little water if it is aggressive.
- Three hours, and no longerThree hours -- Thin slices soften and break up with long soaking, so keep an eye on them; dice or cubes hold up better than thin slices over the full three hours.
- Drain properlyTip the potatoes into a colander and let them stand several minutes. Residual marinade will thin the mayonnaise and the salad will weep on the plate.
- SeasoningNo salt, pepper, onion or mustard is mentioned. Salt the potatoes as they soak; chopped onion or a little mustard in the mayonnaise are period-plausible additions if you want them.
- Homemade mayonnaise"Thick mayonnaise dressing" means the raw-yolk emulsion, not jarred salad dressing. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurised eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated rather than standing out on a supper table for hours.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 2 lb of potatoes and roughly a cup of mayonnaise to serve six as a side, with enough of the vinegar-and-oil mixture to cover the potatoes during the soak.
Potato salad is often said to have reached American tables through German immigrant cooking, where the dish is traditionally dressed warm with vinegar and fat; the mayonnaise-bound version that dominates American picnics today is the later hybrid, and this recipe catches the two halves in the same bowl, vinegar soak first and mayonnaise after. In a nineteenth-century household the evening meal was often the light one, built from cold dishes and leftovers, and cold boiled potatoes from dinner were exactly the sort of thing a cook was expected to turn into something presentable. The extreme brevity is characteristic of the genre too.