Home › Cookery › Potato Salad (Boil your potatoes very)
Potato Salad (Boil your potatoes very)
Boil your potatoes very carefully; or, rather, steam them until very dry and mealy; cut in slices and prepare a dressing of egg, onion, mustard, oil, pepper, salt, and vinegar, and pour over them.--W. S. S.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in 1879 household books: the proportions are left to the cook. What follows fills in the gaps without changing the intent.
- The hinge: dress the potatoes warmSlice and dress them while still hot from the steamer, so they drink up the vinegar and oil. Cold potatoes shed dressing and taste flat. The original's insistence on "very dry and mealy" points the same way, though it says nothing directly about temperature.
- Choose a waxy potato anyway"Mealy" was the period ideal, but a floury baking potato collapses into slices you cannot lift. Yukon Gold or a red-skinned waxy potato holds its shape and still tastes dry rather than gluey.
- Steaming, not boilingThe instruction is deliberate. Whole, unpeeled potatoes over simmering water for 20-30 minutes, until a skewer slides in with no resistance; peel and slice while hot.
- What the dressing meansEgg, mustard, oil and vinegar together suggest a mayonnaise or a thin mayonnaise-based sauce. The recipe says only "egg," so it may mean a raw yolk beaten with mustard while the oil is dripped in and then loosened with vinegar, or a hard-boiled yolk mashed to a paste, which is easier and will not split. Both approaches appear in cookbooks of the period.
- Workable proportionsFor 2 lb potatoes: 1 yolk, 1 teaspoon dry or prepared mustard, about 3/4 cup oil, 2-3 tablespoons cider or white wine vinegar, 1 small onion grated fine, salt and pepper. Add the vinegar last and taste; potatoes take more salt than seems reasonable.
- Raw yolkThe dressing is never cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, or build the dressing on a hard-boiled yolk.
- OnionGrated raw onion in a warm salad grows sharp within a few hours. Grate it fine, or soak the chopped onion in the vinegar for ten minutes before mixing to blunt the bite.
- Yield and serving2 lb of potatoes serves six as a side. Serve at room temperature within a couple of hours; refrigeration firms the oil and dulls the seasoning.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, is a collection of contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why this entry ends with "W. S. S." rather than a full set of measurements. Potato salad is often said to have reached American tables by two routes, the French salade de pommes de terre dressed in oil and vinegar and the German kitchens of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley, and this version is plainly of the first sort, oil-based rather than the sweet-sour bacon dressing. The insistence on steaming to a dry, mealy state reflects a period preoccupation with the watery potato, a common complaint in nineteenth-century cookbooks.