Potato Salad
One pint of hot potatoes, one-half cup of chopped celery, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, lettuce, mayonnaise dressing.
Stir lightly together the hot potatoes, celery, parsley and one-third of the mayonnaise dressing, breaking the potatoes as you stir in small pieces. Keep on the ice until ready to serve.
Place one large tablespoonful on a leaf of lettuce, and serve in the leaf, with a tablespoonful of the dressing on top. If a slight flavor of onion is desired, rub a slice of onion or a little garlic around the salad bowl.
A plain turn-of-the-century potato salad that depends on one thing: dressing the potatoes while they are still hot.
- The hingeHot potatoes absorb dressing; cold ones repel it. Diced and dressed the moment they are drained, they take up the mayonnaise and season all the way through, which is why the recipe insists on hot potatoes rather than leftover boiled ones.
- A pint of potatoesMeasured by volume after cooking and cutting, roughly 2 cups, or about 1 lb of whole potatoes before boiling. The recipe names no variety; the instruction to break the potatoes into small pieces as you stir suggests a potato soft enough to yield a little at the edges rather than a firm waxy one.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn this period the name usually covers a hand-made egg-and-oil emulsion with vinegar or lemon, though cooked boiled dressings often went by the same name. Commercial mayonnaise works, but loosen it with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice so it coats hot potato without seizing into a paste.
- Divided dressingOne-third goes in warm as a seasoning; the remaining two-thirds is spooned over at the table. Do not fold it all in at once or the salad turns heavy and the serving spoonful loses its point.
- Keep on the iceRefrigerate, and keep it cold. Egg-based dressing on cooked potato left out at room temperature for hours is the classic setting for bacterial growth; make it the day you serve it and return it to the refrigerator between servings.
- The onion trickRubbing a cut onion or a bruised garlic clove around the bowl leaves only a trace of aroma, which is what the recipe offers for anyone wanting 'a slight flavor of onion'; if you want actual onion flavor, a tablespoon of finely minced shallot folded in with the celery is more direct.
Ninety-Nine Salads belongs to a wave of small single-subject American cookbooks published around the turn of the twentieth century, when salad shifted from a minor relish to a course worth a book of its own. Potato salad is often said to have reached American tables through German immigration, though the German version was typically dressed warm with bacon fat and vinegar; the mayonnaise-bound version here reflects the era's enthusiasm for cooked and hand-beaten egg dressings, which recur throughout such collections. The presentation, one neat spoonful on a single lettuce leaf, is characteristic of the period's individually plated salad course. The suggestion to scent the bowl with onion rather than add it shows the same restraint at work.