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Potato Salad (To one quart potatoes mashed)
To one quart potatoes mashed fine and rubbed through a colander: 1 tablespoonful fresh butter. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1 teacupful rich milk. Cream all together and beat until light. Rub the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs with- 2 teaspoonfuls mustard. 2 teaspoonfuls sugar. 1 teaspoonful pepper. 1 teaspoonful salt. Enough pepper vinegar to moisten. Then chop the whites of the eggs very fine and mix in.
Put a layer of the potatoes in the salad-bowl and with a spoon put the dressing over in spots. Another layer of potatoes, then the dressing, and so on, putting the dressing on top.
Garnish with curled parsley, and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A mashed potato salad rather than a cubed one, dressed with a cooked-yolk mustard dressing and layered in the bowl. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the measures and one of the ingredients need translating.
- A quart of mashed potatoThat is about 2 lb of potatoes before cooking, boiled and passed through a colander or ricer while hot. Floury potatoes (russet, King Edward) push through more easily than waxy ones.
- TeacupfulPeriod conversion tables vary: a teacup is often reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, roughly 6 fl oz, though some sources treat it as a full cup and others as a gill. Add the milk gradually; a quart of potato will take more or less depending on how dry it is.
- Pepper vinegarA Southern staple: cider or white vinegar steeped with small hot peppers, still sold bottled as pepper sauce or pepper vinegar. Plain cider vinegar with a few drops of hot sauce gives the same effect. Use only enough to loosen the yolk paste to a thick cream.
- The dressing has no oilThis is a cooked-yolk dressing, not mayonnaise, so it will be stiff and grainy rather than pourable. That is intentional; it is meant to sit in distinct pockets against the bland potato.
- Seasoning is aggressiveA teaspoon each of salt and pepper into three egg yolks reads as a lot because it is meant to season the whole bowl through the layering. Taste as you build and hold some back if the potato is already well salted.
- Do not stir it togetherThe point of the alternating layers is that the diner gets seasoned and unseasoned potato in the same spoonful. Mixing it smooth turns it into seasoned mashed potato.
- Temperature and yieldThe recipe says nothing about temperature; it is easiest to assemble while the potato is still warm, and it is usually served cool or at room temperature, as refrigeration tends to make the mash pasty. A quart of potato would serve roughly six as a side, though no yield is given.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was drawn from contributions credited on its title page to some two hundred and fifty of Virginia's housewives, and many entries close with initials like "Mrs. S. T." rather than a full name. The dish belongs to the older sense of "salad" as a dressed cold dish rather than a leafy one, and its dressing is of the pre-mayonnaise kind: hard yolks worked to a paste with mustard, sugar and vinegar, a formula found in English cookery well before bottled salad dressings were on the shelf. Pepper vinegar, the flavouring that gives this a Southern cast, was a household standby made by dropping small hot peppers into a bottle of vinegar and letting it stand; it turns up in Virginia and Carolina cookbooks of the period as a seasoning for greens, fish and cold meats.