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Potatoes and Onions
Boil potatoes in skins, peel while hot and slice; about an hour before wanted, slice onions, and let stand in salt and water; while peeling potatoes, put onions in skillet with a little ham gravy or butter and a little water, and cook slightly; take out, put in vegetable dish a layer of onions, then potatoes, then onions, etc., with potatoes last; add a cup of vinegar to skillet (with ham gravy or butter), warm and pour over.
A warm potato-and-onion salad built on ham fat and vinegar, closer to a German-style hot slaw than to anything mayonnaise-bound. The whole dish hinges on assembling and dressing it while everything is still hot.
- Work hotPotatoes absorb dressing only while warm; once cold they seal up and the vinegar just pools at the bottom. Peel and slice them as soon as you can handle them, and pour the hot vinegar over immediately before serving.
- The onion soakAn hour in salted water tempers the raw bite of onions. A tablespoon of salt to a quart of water is a reasonable ratio; drain them before they go in the pan, though note that the recipe deliberately adds a little water to the skillet, so some steaming is intended.
- Ham gravyHere this means the rendered fat and browned drippings left in the pan after frying ham, not a thickened sauce. Bacon fat is the closest everyday substitute; about 2 tablespoons for two pounds of potatoes.
- "Cook slightly"The onions should go translucent and limp, not brown or sweet — three or four minutes over medium heat. They are meant to keep some bite against the soft potato.
- A cup of vinegar is a lotHousehold vinegar of this period was homemade or unstandardised and varied considerably in strength, so it need not have matched today's 5 percent cider vinegar. Start with half a cup, warm it in the skillet to lift the browned bits, taste, and add more; a pinch of sugar takes the edge off if it is sharp.
- SkilletA heavy pan. Enamelled or stainless is safest with that much hot vinegar; bare cast iron, unlined aluminium and bare copper all react with acid and can taint the flavour.
- SeasoningThe original assumes salt from the onion soak and the ham fat and nothing else. Black pepper and a scatter of parsley are period-appropriate and much improve it.
- YieldTwo pounds of potatoes and two medium onions gives six side servings. It is best within twenty minutes of assembly and does not reheat well.
This is a household economy dish of the sort that fills the vegetable chapter of Buckeye Cookery (1877), a compilation gathered from Ohio women and organized around using what the kitchen already had — in this case the ham drippings left in the skillet from an earlier meal. The hot vinegar-and-fat dressing is often associated with German-American cooking, and Ohio in the 1870s had a very large German-speaking population, particularly in Cincinnati; the same technique underlies the hot potato salads and wilted lettuce dishes that appear throughout Midwestern books of the period.