Potato Salad
Boil four large Irish potatoes, peel and mash smooth; mince two onions, and add to the potato, make a dressing of the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, one small tea-cup of vinegar, one tea-spoon black pepper, one dessert-spoon each of celery seeds and salt, one tablespoon each of prepared mustard and melted butter; mix well with potato, and garnish with slices of egg and celery or lettuce. Or, chop cold boiled potatoes fine with enough raw onions to season nicely; make a dressing as for lettuce salad, and pour over it.- Mrs. James A. Jennings, Nashville, Tennessee.
A mashed-potato salad rather than a cubed one, dressed while still warm. The proportions are workable as written, though the salt and vinegar want tasting as you go.
- Irish potatoesSimply ordinary white potatoes, distinguished in period books from sweet potatoes. Four large ones is roughly 2 lb; russets mash smoothest, Yukon Golds hold a little more body.
- Small tea-cup of vinegarA period tea-cup is smaller than a modern cup, usually reckoned somewhere between a gill (4 oz) and 6 oz, so a small one is perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 cup. That is a sharp dressing for 2 lb of potato; add half, taste, then decide. Cider vinegar suits it better than distilled.
- Dessert-spoonTwo teaspoons. A dessert-spoon each of celery seed and salt means about 2 teaspoons of each. Celery seed at that level is assertive but correct for the period; the salt is roughly right for 2 lb of potato if you salted the boiling water lightly.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe recipe does not say so, but the order of work (boil, peel, mash, then mix in the dressing) implies the potato is still warm, and warm potato takes up vinegar and butter more readily than cold. Mix while it still steams, then chill.
- Raw onionTwo whole onions minced raw is a great deal by modern taste. Use one medium, and soak the mince in cold water for ten minutes to pull the harshness out if the salad will sit overnight.
- Prepared mustardNineteenth-century prepared mustard was generally sharper and plainer than modern American yellow, which is a later product. Dijon or an English mustard will give something closer to the intended bite.
- The egg yolksMash the three hard-boiled yolks to a paste with the butter and mustard first, then thin with vinegar. Added whole to the bowl they stay as yellow lumps. The whites are wasted otherwise, so slice them into the garnish.
- YieldServes six to eight as a side. Better after a few hours in the refrigerator, and it holds two days.
Potato salad in American cookbooks of this era divides into two camps, and Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) prints both in one entry: a bound style whose dressing is hard-boiled yolks mashed with vinegar, mustard and melted butter, and the plainer German-influenced version of chopped cold potato with onion and "a dressing as for lettuce salad." The second is the older practice, generally traced to German and Central European kitchens where warm potatoes were dressed with vinegar and no egg at all; it traveled with German settlement through Ohio and the Midwest. The mashed treatment here is unusual to modern eyes. Like much of this book, the recipe is credited to a named contributor, part of the community-cookbook habit of collecting kitchen practice by attribution.