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Potato Salad
Potato salad may be made all the year round with both new and old potatoes, and when plainly boiled is an agreeable accompaniment to cold meat. Cold potatoes that are left may be served up in this way, and will form an appetising dish. If the potatoes are boiled on purpose for the salad, small ones should be picked out, as they often prove wasteful when boiled with large ones. They should be boiled in their jackets, and should be peeled and sliced whilst warm. Make the salad two or three hours before it is wanted. Cut the potatoes into slices the third of an inch thick. Put these in layers into the salad bowl, and sprinkle over each layer a little pepper and salt, finely-chopped parsley, and, if liked, minced chives or shallot. Add oil and vinegar in the proportion of two table-spoonfuls of vinegar to three of oil, and stir them well into the salad. Garnish with sliced beetroot, pickled gherkins, olives, or herbs, or boil an egg hard, mince the yolk and the white separately, and place them in little heaps round the salad. A chopped bloater or two or three sardines finely minced may be stirred in with a potato salad as an occasional change, and tarragon vinegar may be substituted for plain vinegar.
A late-Victorian dressed potato salad, oil-and-vinegar rather than mayonnaise-bound. The instructions are sound; only a few details need translating.
- Dress the potatoes warmThis is the hinge of the dish. Warm potato absorbs the vinegar and oil; cold potato sits in it. Peel and slice as soon as they can be handled and dress immediately, then let the salad stand the two or three hours the recipe asks for.
- Waxy potatoes onlyWaxy potatoes hold up best -- Slices a third of an inch thick hold together better with a waxy variety than with a floury one, though the recipe itself allows both new and old potatoes. Boil in the skins as directed so they take up less water.
- The dressing proportionTwo tablespoons vinegar to three of oil is a sharper ratio than the modern default of one to three. It suits potato, which blunts acidity, but taste before you commit the whole quantity.
- BloaterA whole herring, salted and cold-smoked but only lightly cured, common on Victorian breakfast tables and now hard to find outside specialist smokehouses. Two or three sardines, or a couple of good oil-packed anchovies, give the same salty backbone.
- Chives or shallot"Shallot" here means raw minced shallot, not the softened kind. Use it sparingly; the recipe gives no quantity, and it will dominate once the salad has stood.
- Standing time and the fridgeThe recipe asks for two or three hours' standing but says nothing about temperature; a cool room is what a kitchen of the period would have offered. If you make it further ahead and refrigerate, bring it back to room temperature before serving, as chilled oil looks dull and cloudy.
- YieldNo quantities are given beyond the dressing proportion of three of oil to two of vinegar and the third-of-an-inch slice. Reckon on about 2 lb of potatoes for six as a side dish, and scale the dressing to taste.
The recipe is written as a set of general principles rather than a fixed formula: a method and a proportion, left to the cook to scale. The oil-and-vinegar treatment of potato is often associated with French and German practice, while the mayonnaise-bound potato salad familiar today came to dominate later. The frugal note fits the book's period and audience -- leftover boiled potatoes turned into something worth putting on the table, and small potatoes picked out deliberately because, as the recipe says, they prove wasteful when boiled with large ones. The garnishes of beetroot, gherkin, olive and hard-boiled egg, the yolk and white minced separately and set in little heaps, suggest a taste for salads composed for the eye as well as the palate.