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POTATO SALAD (a French recipe)
Cut ten or twelve cold boiled potatoes into slices from a quarter of an inch to half an inch thick; put these into a salad bowl with four table-spoonfuls of tarragon or plain vinegar, six table-spoonfuls of best salad-oil, one table-spoonful of minced parsley, and pepper and salt to taste. Stir well, that all the ingredients may be thoroughly mixed. Potato salad should be made two or three hours before it is required for the table. Anchovies, olives, or any pickles may be added to it, and also bits of cold beef, chicken, or turkey, if desired. It is excellent, however, without these.
A plain oil-and-vinegar potato salad of the French kind, with no mayonnaise anywhere near it. The only real technique here is dressing the potatoes while they still hold their shape but before they have gone cold and waxy-hard.
- Dress them warmThe recipe says cold boiled potatoes, but the dressing is absorbed far better if the slices are still slightly warm. Cool potatoes take the oil only on the surface and the salad tastes flat.
- Potato choiceTen or twelve potatoes here means medium boiling potatoes, perhaps 3 to 4 lb at modern sizes, though period potatoes often ran smaller. Use a waxy variety such as Charlotte or a red-skinned potato; floury baking potatoes will collapse into paste when stirred.
- The ratioSix tablespoons oil to four of vinegar is sharper than most modern vinaigrettes, which run 3:1. It works because the potato starch blunts acid, but taste before serving and add oil if it bites.
- Tarragon vinegarOnce a standard pantry bottle, now less common. White wine vinegar with a few fresh tarragon leaves bruised into it for an hour gives a similar effect; cider vinegar is a reasonable substitute.
- Salad-oilIn this period this meant a mild olive oil, or sometimes refined nut or poppyseed oil. A fruity extra-virgin olive oil will dominate; a lighter olive oil suits the dish better.
- Stir well, but onceFold the slices over with a broad spoon or spatula rather than tossing repeatedly. Each stir breaks edges, and enough breakage turns the bowl into mash.
- The two-hour restThis is not padding. Potatoes need that time to draw in the vinegar and seasoning. Keep it at cool room temperature rather than in the refrigerator, where the oil congeals and the flavour shuts down.
- YieldAs given, roughly six to eight as a side dish. With the addition of chopped cold beef, chicken or turkey it will serve about four as a light main course.
Cassell's flags this as "a French recipe", and the contrast is with the boiled dressings and, later, mayonnaise that came to bind many British and American potato salads, while the French treated cooked potatoes as one more salad vegetable to be dressed with oil, vinegar and herbs. Mayonnaise-bound potato salad, in particular, became widespread rather later than this book. The oil-and-vinegar approach is long established in the French kitchen, and it survives today as salade de pommes de terre and in the German and Austrian vinegar-dressed versions. The closing suggestion of anchovies, olives, pickles or scraps of cold roast would have suited a household with a cold joint and yesterday's boiled potatoes to use up.