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German Potato Salad
6 medium sized potatoes 1/4 lb. fat bacon 1 small onion 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon black pepper 1/2 cup hot vinegar 1/2 cup hot water 2 tablespoons salad oil Boil the potatoes and after draining set them over the fire to dry. Peel and slice while warm. Cover at once with dressing made as follows: Cut the bacon into small dice, put in frying pan over a slow fire. Shred the onion into a large bowl, add salt, hot vinegar and hot water. When the fat is a light brown color and the dice well crisped, add the salad oil and pour it into the vinegar and onion, turning it slowly at first lest it spatter. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves, garnish with pickled beets. Best served as soon as made.
A hot-bacon-dressing potato salad of the standard American-German type, and it depends almost entirely on temperature. A few notes on the vocabulary and the timing.
- Slice the potatoes warmThis is the hinge. Warm potato absorbs the vinegar dressing; cold potato sheds it and the salad tastes of dressing sitting on top rather than through. Boil them whole in their skins, drain, and return the pan to low heat for a minute or two to steam off surface water, which is what the instruction to "set them over the fire to dry" means.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of bacon is 4 oz, about four ordinary rashers or two to three thick-cut. Six medium potatoes is roughly 2 lb, and the whole thing serves four to six as a side.
- Salad oilAt the period this meant a bland, refined oil, commonly cottonseed, not olive. Any neutral oil works; olive oil is fine if you want it, but it will push the flavour away from the German original.
- Slow fire for the baconMedium-low, and give it ten to twelve minutes. The point is to render the fat out cleanly before the dice crisp; a hot pan browns the outside and leaves you short of the fat that carries the dressing.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar then and now runs about 5 percent acid, so the half-and-half dilution with hot water holds up. Cider vinegar suits the dish better than distilled white. Two teaspoons of salt is generous but not wrong for 2 lb of potatoes — add half, taste, then finish.
- Pouring the fatHot bacon fat meeting vinegar will spit. Pour it into the bowl in a thin stream and turn it slowly at first, exactly as written.
- Serve at onceThe closing line is doing real work. This salad is at its best warm, within twenty minutes or so; refrigerated, the bacon fat sets to white flecks and the potatoes go firm and dull. It reheats poorly.
Hot potato salad dressed with bacon fat and vinegar rather than mayonnaise came to American cookbooks with German immigration through the nineteenth century, and by the time flour-milling companies were issuing promotional cookbooks it was familiar enough to need no explanation beyond the name. The distinction the title draws is against the cold, mayonnaise-bound potato salad also common in American books of the period. The pickled beet garnish and the bed of lettuce follow presentation conventions of the era, in which salads were frequently served on a leaf with a note of colour added. Gold Medal booklets were published by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis.