Potato Salad
1 pt. boiled potatoes. 1 onion, minced. 3 hard-boiled eggs. Chop onion fine, cut potatoes in cubes, cut yolks and whites of eggs in small pieces, or rings. Mix with cooked dressing. Good everyday salad. Cut potatoes in balls with vegetable scoop for top of salad.
A skeleton recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already owns a jar of boiled dressing. Two things need filling in: what "cooked dressing" means and how much salt and acid the potatoes want.
- Cooked dressingThis is boiled dressing — milk or water, vinegar, egg, a little flour and mustard, cooked to a thin custard and cooled. It is tarter and looser than mayonnaise. The nearest quick substitute is mayonnaise slackened with cider vinegar and a pinch of dry mustard.
- A pint of potatoesA volume measure, roughly three-quarters of a pound, or two medium potatoes; the text does not make clear whether the pint is measured before or after cubing. Use a waxy variety; a floury baking potato collapses into paste once it meets dressing.
- Dress them warmThe hinge of any potato salad. Warm potato absorbs vinegar and salt; cold potato repels it and the dressing sits on the surface. Toss the cubes with a spoonful of vinegar and salt while they still steam, then fold in the dressing once cool.
- SeasoningNone is listed, which does not mean none is wanted. Salt generously and taste before serving — boiled potato needs more than most cooks expect.
- The onionOne raw onion minced into a pound of potato is assertive by current taste. Half a small onion, or a few scallions, is closer to modern balance; a brief rinse in cold water takes the bite off without losing the flavour.
- Vegetable scoopA ball cutter, of the sort now sold as a melon baller. The recipe implies scooping the balls from the cooked potato; if they crumble, scoop from raw peeled potato and boil them separately so they hold their shape, then arrange them on top.
- Yield and holdingServes four as a side. An egg-and-dairy dressing at room temperature is a poor keeper — refrigerate and eat within a day rather than letting the bowl sit out through an afternoon.
Potato salad is often traced to German immigrant cooking in nineteenth-century America, though cold dressed potato also has English and French precedents. By the time Mary A. Wilson was writing for the Ladies' Home Journal in the late 1910s it had become exactly what she calls it here: a good everyday salad, cheap, filling, and made from things already cooked. The boiled dressing she assumes is the older technology — a cooked egg-and-vinegar sauce made at home, at a time when commercial jarred mayonnaise was still spreading through American groceries. Wilson's wartime and post-war recipes are consistently built around stretching food and using up leftovers, and the closing flourish of scooped potato balls gives a plain dish a presentable top for almost no extra cost.