Home › Salads of Meat, Fish, Vegetables and Fruit › Potato Salad
Potato Salad
Cut cold boiled potatoes into even dice (about six potatoes). Mix with these the chopped whites of three hard-boiled eggs. Mix the yolks with a scant teaspoon of dry mustard and stir into it a large cup of thick sour cream; add a little paprika, pour the dressing over the potato and mix gently. This is very delicious. No salt is needed if the potatoes are boiled with a pinch of salt in the water.-Mrs Clinton Locke, Chicago.
A cooked-dressing-free potato salad that leans entirely on sour cream and mustard for its bite. It works, but a few of the period's assumptions need translating.
- "A large cup" of creamRead this as a generous 8 oz; "large" may mean a little more, but the recipe gives no way to know. Add it to the mashed yolks gradually; the dressing should coat the dice, not pool under them.
- Sour cream then and nowIn this period the term usually meant naturally soured cream, thicker and sharper than the cultured tub product. Modern full-fat sour cream is the right substitute; creme fraiche is closer in richness if you want the older texture. Avoid light or fat-free versions, which break and turn watery against warm potato.
- Choose the potatoThe recipe says only "cold boiled potatoes," but the dice needs to hold its shape. Waxy potatoes -- Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerling -- stay intact; a floury baking potato will collapse into paste when you mix.
- The salting note is load-bearingThe instruction to skip salt assumes the potatoes were boiled in salted water, which is the dish's only source of salt. If yours were not, salt them while still warm, before the cream goes on, or the salad will taste flat no matter how much you add at the table.
- Dry mustard needs a momentA scant teaspoon of English-style mustard powder mashed into the warm yolks develops its heat over about ten minutes. Mix the dressing first, let it stand, then dress the potatoes.
- Dress while just warmThe recipe specifies cold boiled potatoes, but cold potato absorbs little dressing. If you depart from the original, cut and dress the potatoes when barely warm to the touch, then chill.
- AcidThere is no vinegar or lemon here, so the whole balance rests on how sharp your cream is. Taste before serving; a teaspoon of cider vinegar is a reasonable correction with a mild modern sour cream.
- Yield and keepingSix potatoes and three eggs will serve roughly four to six as a side, though the recipe gives no yield. Being a dairy-dressed salad, keep it refrigerated and off the buffet table for more than a couple of hours.
Potato salad dressed with soured cream rather than oil and vinegar points to the German and Central European kitchen, which reached American cookbooks through immigrant households and, by the end of the nineteenth century, through the recipe-exchange culture of women's clubs and church societies. This one is a contributed recipe -- signed, attributed to a named Chicago woman -- with chatty asides such as "this is very delicious" included. The reliance on thick sour cream is itself a period marker. Households that kept their own cream, or bought it unpasteurised from a dairy, had a naturally soured product constantly on hand and used it where a later cook would reach for mayonnaise, which was still a somewhat fussy homemade item and is often said not to have become the American potato-salad default until commercial jars were widespread.