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Potato Salad. No. 2
Four cold boiled potatoes, one onion chopped very fine, French dressing, parsley, beet, turnip and carrot, capers or olives.
Cut cold boiled potatoes into thin slices, mix them carefully with the onion, then add the dressing and turn them upside down without breaking the potatoes. Put them away in a cold place for one or two hours. Sprinkle with the chopped parsley. The dish may be garnished with parsley, pickled beets, turnips and carrots cut in fancy shapes, capers or olives.
A mayonnaise-free potato salad in the older French manner, where the dressing does all the work. Two details in the original carry the whole dish: the type of dressing and the way the potatoes are turned.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn a book of this period this is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken together. It is not the sweetened orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Dress the potatoes while barely warmThe recipe specifies "cold boiled potatoes," but potatoes absorb vinaigrette better while still slightly warm. If you are cooking them specially, slice and dress them while they retain some heat, then chill as directed.
- Use a waxy potatoYukon Gold, red-skinned or fingerling varieties hold their shape in slices. A floury baking potato will crumble at exactly the point the recipe warns against.
- "Turn them upside down"Most likely a direction to fold rather than stir: lift from underneath with a broad spoon or spatula and turn the pile over on itself so the dressing reaches the bottom slices without breaking them.
- The onionOne onion chopped very fine means a raw onion carrying the whole dish, which by modern palates is a lot. A small shallot or a few spring onions gives the same effect with less heat.
- Resting timeOne or two hours in a cold place is the marinating step, not merely chilling. Do not skip it; undressed-tasting potato salad is the usual result of serving straight away.
- The garnish vegetablesBeets, turnips and carrots "cut in fancy shapes" were cooked or pickled and used as decoration around the edge, not mixed in. Add pickled beets last, or at the table, or they will stain the whole bowl pink.
- YieldFour potatoes will serve roughly four as a side dish, though the recipe gives no yield.
Salad books multiplied in English and American kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, when refrigeration, cheaper year-round vegetables and the fashion for a cold course at luncheon made whole volumes of them commercially plausible. This is the older, plainer branch of potato salad: oil and vinegar rather than boiled or mayonnaise dressing, closer to the French salade de pommes de terre and to German potato salads than to the mayonnaise-bound picnic version that came to dominate American tables after commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the 1910s and 1920s. The elaborate garnish of root vegetables cut in fancy shapes belongs to the same period's enthusiasm for decorative cold work.