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Irish Potato Salad
Cut ten or twelve cold boiled potatoes into small pieces. Put into a salad bowl with- 4 tablespoonfuls vinegar. 4 tablespoonfuls best salad oil. 1 teaspoonful minced parsley. Pepper and salt to taste.
Stir all well that they may be thoroughly mixed; it should be made several hours before putting on the table.
Throw in bits of pickle, cold fowl, a garnish of grated cracker, and hard-boiled eggs.--Mrs. C. V. McG., Alabama.
A plain oil-and-vinegar potato salad of the sort that predates mayonnaise dressings in American home cookery. The only real technique here is the timing of the dressing.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe instruction to make it several hours ahead is the hinge, but it works far better if the potatoes are still warm when the oil and vinegar go on. Cold boiled potatoes absorb very little; warm ones drink the dressing and season through.
- Quantity and yieldTen or twelve potatoes, if taken as medium ones, comes to roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb, which would serve eight to ten as a side. Waxy varieties hold their shape after cutting; floury bakers will crumble into the dressing.
- The dressing ratioFour tablespoons each of oil and vinegar is a 1:1 dressing, sharper than most modern palates expect and light for 3 lb of potato. Vinegar of the period was not standardised and its strength varied against today's usual 5 percent. Taste and consider shifting toward two parts oil to one of vinegar.
- "Best salad oil"In 1879 this would usually have meant olive oil, the good bottle kept for the table rather than for cooking, though 'salad oil' was also used of refined domestic oils. Cottonseed and other neutral oils were the cheaper option. Use a decent olive oil.
- Grated crackerA garnish of hard water crackers or soda crackers grated over the top, giving a dry crumb finish. It softens quickly, so add it at the table rather than hours ahead.
- Bits of pickle and cold fowlThese turn the dish from a side into a supper. Cold fowl means leftover roast or boiled chicken; the pickle is unspecified, and a sharp cucumber pickle suits the dressing better than a sweet one.
- Hard-boiled eggsSliced or quartered over the top rather than mixed in, in the manner of the period. Eggs held several hours at room temperature with the salad are best kept refrigerated until serving instead.
- SaltingPotatoes absorb a surprising amount of salt and the recipe leaves it entirely to taste. Season, wait twenty minutes, then taste again before deciding it needs more.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Southern housewives, catches potato salad at a point when it was still understood as a dressed salad in the French manner rather than the creamy picnic dish it became. "Irish potato" was the standard Southern term distinguishing the ordinary white potato from the sweet potato, which in parts of the region may simply have been "the potato" unless specified otherwise. The oil-and-vinegar dressing, the several hours of resting, and the garnish of egg and cold fowl all recall the English and French salmagundi tradition of a composed salad built on leftovers, though the resemblance is not evidence of direct descent; mayonnaise-bound potato salad spread widely in America only later, with commercial mayonnaise in the early twentieth century. The initials-and-state attribution, Mrs. C. V. McG. of Alabama, is typical of the book's method: Tyree gathered recipes by correspondence from across the South and printed them largely as sent, contradictions and all.