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Potatoes En Salade
Boil, peel, and slice potatoes, and season them with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and fine herbs, either sliced gherkins, beetroot, or capers.
A one-line French-style potato salad with no quantities at all, which is normal for Cassell's shorter entries. The proportions and the temperature of the potatoes are what decide whether it works.
- Dress the potatoes warmWarm potatoes take up oil and vinegar far better than cold ones, which tend to leave the dressing sitting on the surface. Peel and slice as soon as they can be handled and pour the dressing over at once.
- Choose a waxy varietyCharlotte, Ratte, Anya, or any firm salad potato holds its slices. Floury bakers collapse into a mash as soon as they are turned in the dressing.
- Proportions for the dressingThree parts oil to one of vinegar is the usual vinaigrette ratio. For 2 lb of potatoes, roughly 6 tablespoons oil to 2 of wine vinegar, with salt and pepper to taste, is a workable starting point.
- "Fine herbs"Fines herbes means the classic quartet of parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon, chopped fine. Parsley and chives alone are perfectly usual; tarragon is assertive, so use it sparingly.
- Oil'oil' in nineteenth-century English cookery books generally means olive oil, sold as salad oil. A mild olive oil suits; a grassy, peppery modern extra virgin will dominate the potato.
- BeetrootCooked beetroot bleeds. Add it at the last moment, or dress it separately and arrange it around the edge, unless a uniformly pink salad is wanted.
- Yield and serving2 lb of potatoes serves six as a side. Serve at room temperature, not chilled; refrigeration firms the oil and dulls the seasoning.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise is the older and more emphatically French of the two traditions, and English cookery books of the later nineteenth century often signal it by keeping the name in French — en salade, à la parisienne. Cassell's gives it as a brief working entry, of the kind where a compiler assumed the reader already knew what a vinaigrette was and needed only the list of what might go into it. The optional garnishes given here — gherkins, beetroot, capers — are the sharp, pickled accents associated with the period's cold table, where a potato salad is likely to have appeared beside cold joints, galantines and pressed meats at supper or on a buffet rather than as a summer dish in its own right.