Home › Outdoor and Camping Recipes › Potato and Egg Salad
Potato and Egg Salad
6 eggs, hard cooked 6 medium sized potatoes, boiled 2 tablespoons chopped onion French dressing mayonnaise Cube hard cooked eggs, reserving one for garnish, and mix with diced, hot potatoes. Add chopped onion and French dressing. Serve very cold on crisp lettuce leaves, garnish with mayonnaise and sliced hard cooked egg.
A straightforward picnic salad whose one real technique is dressing the potatoes while they are still hot. Everything else is assembly.
- Dress the potatoes hotHot potatoes absorb vinaigrette; cold ones shed it. Peel and dice them as soon as you can handle them and get the French dressing on while they are still hot. (The recipe's own order is to mix the cubed eggs in with the hot potatoes and then add the onion and dressing.)
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a book of this era French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name now. The recipe gives no quantity; something on the order of a third of a cup would be enough for six potatoes.
- Potato choiceWaxy potatoes hold their cubes; russets fall apart once dressed hot. Boil them whole and unpeeled so they do not waterlog.
- Hard-cooked eggsCover eggs with cold water, bring to a boil, cover and take off the heat for 10-12 minutes, then chill in cold water. Overcooked yolks turn grey-green and sulphurous, which shows badly in a pale salad.
- OnionTwo tablespoons of raw onion is assertive after the salad has stood a few hours. Rinse the chopped onion in cold water and pat dry if you want it milder, or use scallion.
- Chilling and the camping contextChilling -- The recipe wants it very cold, and this is a mayonnaise-and-egg salad: keep it below 40F in a cooler with ice, not merely in the shade, and return leftovers to the ice promptly.
- YieldSix potatoes and six eggs serve about six as a side, four as a lunch. Salt after dressing, as the potatoes take more than you expect.