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Salad (Boiled white potatoes apple)
3 boiled white potatoes 1 apple 1/2 cucumber 1/2 cup cooked peas 1/4 teaspoon celery salt 1 hard-boiled egg Mayonnaise dressing Slice the potatoes; chop the cucumber, apple and egg; then mix all the ingredients together, pouring over them Mayonnaise dressing. Serve on crisp lettuce leaves. 1 head lettuce
A straightforward composed potato salad of the sort that filled the salad chapters of American cookbooks a century ago. The only real decisions are the size of the potatoes and how much dressing to use.
- Potato size and quantity"3 boiled white potatoes" assumed a medium boiling potato of roughly 5-6 oz, so about 1 lb total. Waxy varieties hold their slices; a floury baking potato will crumble into the mayonnaise.
- Dress them warmPotato salads are often dressed while the potatoes are still warm, since warm potato takes up dressing more readily. Slice them as soon as they can be handled, then fold in the apple, cucumber and egg cold.
- The cucumberCucumbers of this period were often thick-skinned and worth peeling and seeding. Salt the chopped flesh for ten minutes and drain it, or its water will thin the dressing.
- The appleUse a firm tart apple and cut it last. Toss the dice with a little lemon juice or fold it straight into the dressed potatoes so it does not brown while you work.
- Celery saltStill sold, and still the same thing: ground celery seed cut with salt. A quarter teaspoon is the whole seasoning of the dish, so taste before serving and add plain salt and pepper as needed.
- PeasHalf a cup of cooked peas. Frozen peas thawed under warm water are closer in texture to fresh than canned, which collapse into the mixture.
- Mayonnaise dressingA period mayonnaise of this kind would almost certainly be a raw-yolk emulsion. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg, is the practical substitute; about 1/2 cup dresses this quantity without drowning it.
- YieldServes four as a side, on the leaves of the single head of lettuce listed at the end. Keep it refrigerated and eat it the day it is made, since the apple and cucumber both weep overnight.
Composed salads bound with mayonnaise had become fashionable in American kitchens by the turn of the twentieth century, along with the vogue for serving cold dishes on a bed of lettuce as a light luncheon course. The combination here -- cooked potato and peas stretched with raw apple and cucumber and garnished with a single hard-boiled egg -- is thrift dressed up: leftovers from the previous day's dinner reappearing as something that could be set before guests. Apple in a potato salad is common across northern European traditions and remains standard in German and Scandinavian versions, though the mayonnaise binding and the lettuce leaf underneath are characteristically American.