Potato Salad
INGREDIENTS for salad for 8 persons.-10 or 12 cold boiled potatoes, 4 tablespoonfuls of tarragon or plain vinegar, 6 tablespoonfuls of salad-oil, pepper and salt to taste, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Cut the potatoes into slices about½ inch in thickness; put these into a salad-bowl with oil and vinegar in the above proportion; season with pepper, salt and a teaspoonful of minced parsley; stir the salad well, that all the ingredients may be thoroughly incorporated, and it is ready to serve. This should be made two or three POTATO SOUP. hours before it is wanted for table. Anchovies, olives or pickles may be added to this salad, as also slices of cold beef, fowl or turkey.
SEASONABLE at any time. - INGREDIENTS. - Potato Snow.
Potatoes, salt and water.
Choose large white potatoes, as free from spots as possible; boil them in their skins in salt and water until perfectly tender; drain and dry them thoroughly by the side of the fire, and peel them. Put a hot dish before the fire, rub the potatoes through a coarse sieve on to this dish; do not touch them afterwards, or the flakes will fall, and serve as hot as possible.
TIME. to hour to boil the potatoes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Potato Sanders. (Vegetarian (Vegetarian Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS. - Cold boiled potatoes, flour, bread-crumbs, soaked in water, minced parsley or herbs, seasoning, a little minced onion.
Mix with the mashed potatoes sufficient flour to make a paste, roll this out and cut in small squares. Squeeze the bread dry, add the other ingredients, put a little in each square of paste and close, and bake as a sausage roll.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Three short potato recipes have run together on this page: the salad, potato snow, and a vegetarian potato "sanders". All three are workable, but each assumes knowledge Mrs Beeton's readers had and modern cooks generally do not.
- Dress the potatoes warmStanding time -- the recipe says to make the salad two or three hours before it is wanted, which lets the slices take up the dressing. Note that it specifies cold boiled potatoes; if you prefer, dressing them while still warm (a modern habit, not what is written here) makes them absorb more.
- Salad-oilIn Beeton's day this ordinarily meant olive oil. Any neutral or light olive oil works; a very assertive green oil will dominate.
- The dressing ratioFour tablespoons vinegar to six of oil is sharper than most modern vinaigrettes (which run 1:3). It suits potato, which soaks up acid, but taste before serving and hold back some vinegar if your palate is not used to it.
- Choice of potatoUse a waxy variety — Charlotte, new potatoes, or similar. Floury potatoes disintegrate when sliced half an inch thick and stirred, and "stir the salad well" will reduce them to mash.
- Yield and costIt plausibly serves eight as a side dish, though the recipe gives potatoes by count rather than weight, so judge quantity by eye. The 4d average cost is a Victorian price note, not an instruction.
- Potato snowBoil in the skins, dry off, then rice or sieve directly onto the hot serving dish and do not stir or smooth it. The whole point is that the flakes stand separately; any pressing collapses them. The stated boiling time is illegible in this text; large potatoes in their skins will take roughly half to three-quarters of an hour.
- Potato sanders: no temperature givenThe recipe only says to bake them as you would a sausage roll, so a hot oven and baking until the paste is set and browned is the best that can be inferred. The dough is potato and flour only, so it browns rather than puffs; brushing with oil or egg helps.
- The variations are the interesting partAnchovies, olives, pickles or slices of cold beef, fowl or turkey turn the salad into a supper dish. Chopped shallot or a spoonful of mustard in the dressing is period-appropriate and improves it.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar, rather than with mayonnaise or boiled dressing, is the older European form and the one Beeton's household would have recognised — though it is easy to overstate the point, since Beeton's own salad dressings commonly use egg yolk, cream and mustard rather than plain oil and vinegar. The specification of tarragon vinegar is a small marker of Victorian ambition: flavoured vinegars were a standard middle-class store-cupboard item, made at home by steeping herbs, and they gave a cheap dish a note of refinement. The neighbouring entries show how completely the potato had been absorbed into British cooking by then: snow, a dish of sieved flakes served as hot as possible, was a genteel way of presenting plain boiled potatoes, while "potato sanders" belongs to the vegetarian recipes that appear throughout later editions of Beeton, using potato dough and breadcrumbs to imitate the shape and eating of a sausage roll — meatless cookery of a kind that long predates its modern revival.