Home › Salads of Meat, Fish, Vegetables and Fruit › Potato Pepper Salad
Potato Pepper Salad
Cut three large cold potatoes into halfinch dice. Remove the seeds from a green pepper and chop it fine. Mix four tablespoons of vinegar with two tablespoons of ice water, one-fourth teaspoon of powdered sugar, a dash of pepper and half a teaspoon of salt. Put a layer of potatoes in the salad dish, then a layer of the chopped pepper and sprinkle over it a tablespoon of oil. Put in another layer of potatoes and peppers, add another tablespoon of oil, then pour over all the vinegar. Set in the refrigerator for fifteen minutes to marinate. - Maria Willett Howard.
A plain oil-and-vinegar potato salad with no mayonnaise, built in layers so the dressing settles down through it. Everything here works as written; a few details reward attention.
- The potatoes"Three large cold potatoes" implies potatoes already boiled and cooled, most likely leftovers; the recipe does not say how they were cooked. Three large ones will give something in the region of 1 1/2 lb, roughly 4 cups diced. A waxy variety holds the half-inch dice; a floury baking potato is more likely to crumble at the edges into the dressing.
- Dress them warm if you canThe recipe works from already-cold potato, which absorbs less dressing than warm. If you are cooking specifically for this, you can dice while still warm and pour the vinegar mixture over then, though this departs from the method as given: the recipe puts the fifteen minutes in the refrigerator down to marinating.
- The green pepperIn American usage of the period this is a sweet bell pepper, usually sold unripe and green. One medium pepper, finely chopped, is about 3/4 cup.
- The dressing proportionsFour tablespoons vinegar cut with two of ice water, against two tablespoons of oil, is sharp by modern standards — the reverse of a standard vinaigrette ratio. Cider vinegar suits it better than a harsh white distilled vinegar, and more oil will not hurt anything.
- Powdered sugarHere this means finely ground granulated sugar, not confectioners' sugar with cornstarch in it. A quarter teaspoon of ordinary sugar does the same job of taking the edge off the vinegar.
- Salad dishPresumably a shallow, fairly wide bowl; the recipe does not specify. Layering of this kind suits a shallow dish, since in a tall one the dressing poured over at the end has further to travel.
- YieldProbably three or four as a side, though the recipe does not say. Worth tossing gently once before serving to redistribute the oil.
Maria Willett Howard was a cooking teacher and cookbook author of the early twentieth century, working within the domestic-science movement; the attribution of the recipe over her name is the sort of credit periodicals and compiled collections of the era gave contributors. This salad belongs to the older, plainer line of American potato salad -- oil, vinegar, seasoning, no boiled dressing and no mayonnaise, which at this date still generally meant hand-whisked work at home rather than a jar off the shelf. The green pepper is a period touch: sweet peppers turn up freely in salads and relishes in cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s. The layering technique, with oil sprinkled between strata and the vinegar poured over the whole at the end, avoids stirring, which breaks up cold cooked potato.