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Irish Potato Salad
Boil 6 potatoes until very soft, peel and mash. While hot, season to taste with salt, pepper and spice, and add 1 teaspoon butter. Boil 2 eggs and dissolve the yolks in 2 tablespoons vinegar. Pour over potatoes and mix well. Put in dish, slice the egg whites and put over potatoes.
A mashed potato salad rather than a cubed one, dressed with hard-boiled yolk and vinegar instead of mayonnaise. The whole thing hinges on dressing the potatoes while they are still hot.
- Dress them hotWarm starch absorbs the vinegar dressing; cold mashed potato simply sits under it. Have the eggs boiled and the yolks worked into the vinegar before the potatoes come off the heat.
- "Spice"The bare word may mean a single warm spice or a grocer's mixed ground spice; allspice, mace, clove and nutmeg are the usual candidates, though the recipe does not say which is meant. A pinch of allspice or a little mace is the closest single-jar substitute; a quarter teaspoon total is plenty for six potatoes.
- Which potatoes"Boil until very soft" points to a floury variety — russet, King Edward, or anything sold for baking. Waxy salad potatoes will not mash to the intended texture. Six medium potatoes is roughly 2 lb.
- Dissolving the yolksPress the hot yolks through a sieve or mash them thoroughly with a fork before adding the vinegar, or the dressing will stay lumpy. Two tablespoons of vinegar for 2 lb of potato is sharp but not aggressive; cider vinegar suits it better than distilled white.
- ButterA single teaspoon is a token amount by modern standards. A tablespoon will not unbalance the dish.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a side. It is best just warm or at room temperature; refrigeration firms the starch and dulls the vinegar, so dress and serve the same day.
The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, which may be why the entry is four sentences long and assumes the cook knows what "season to taste" involves. Dressing salads with sieved hard-boiled yolk and vinegar was in use in ordinary household kitchens before commercial mayonnaise was widely available, and persisted in frugal cooking -- the yolk supplies fat and an emulsifier, and nothing is wasted, the whites going back on top as garnish.