Potato Salad
1 qt. cold cooked potatoes sliced 1 cucumber sliced 1 cup diced celery 2 cups boiled dressing 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon black pepper Arrange in alternate layers the potatoes and cucumber, sprinkled with seasonings. Add the dressing, do not stir, but lift carefully with forks.
A layered rather than tossed salad, and the handling instruction at the end is the whole point. Two notes on volume and on the dressing will get you there.
- Boiled dressingThis is the cooked, cornstarch- or flour-thickened, egg-and-vinegar dressing that appears elsewhere in books of this vintage, not mayonnaise. It is tangier and looser than mayonnaise; if you substitute, thin mayonnaise with a little cider vinegar and a pinch of sugar and mustard, or the salad will be cloying. Two cups is generous for a quart of potatoes, so add it in stages.
- A quart of potatoesMeasured sliced, not weighed: somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 lb of whole potatoes, four to six medium, depending on how thickly you slice. Waxy varieties hold their edges under the lifting; russets will break down into mash.
- Cook and cool first"Cold cooked potatoes" means simply cooked and thoroughly cooled before assembly; the recipe does not specify the method, though boiling in the skins and peeling while warm is the usual period approach. Slicing while still warm and letting the slices cool gives cleaner edges.
- The cucumberField cucumbers of the period tended to be thick-skinned and seedy, so peeling was probably assumed, though the recipe does not say so. A modern English cucumber needs no peeling, but salt the slices and drain them for twenty minutes or the salad will weep dressing within the hour.
- Lift, do not stirThe instruction is the hinge. Two forks slipped under the layers and raised, turning the salad over on itself a few times, coats everything without shearing the potato slices. Stirring with a spoon produces a gluey mash.
- Season as you goThe salt and pepper are sprinkled between the layers rather than mixed into the dressing. Whatever the reason, seasoning the cut surfaces distributes it more evenly than trying to salt the dressing alone.
- Yield and timingServes six to eight as a side. Best assembled an hour or two ahead and kept cold; it does not hold overnight, as the cucumber softens and releases water.
Gold Medal's cook book belongs to the milling-company genre of the early twentieth century, in which a flour brand published a general household manual to keep its name in the kitchen. That is why a potato salad sits in a flour book at all, and it also suits the dressing: boiled dressings are thickened with flour or cornstarch and cost a fraction of the oil mayonnaise demands, and they remained common in American home cooking until jarred commercial mayonnaise and "salad dressing," which spread through the 1920s and 1930s, gradually displaced them. The layered, unstirred assembly is often linked to the same era's taste for salads that arrived at the table looking composed rather than mixed.