Prince Salad
One pint of cold boiled potatoes, one pint of pickled cauliflower, a French or cooked dressing.
Cut the potatoes into small squares; mince the cauliflower. Pour over the potatoes and cauliflower a French or cooked dressing, stir lightly and serve very cold.
A two-ingredient potato salad that lives or dies on the pickled cauliflower. The measurements are by volume, in the American style of the period, and both dressings named would have been familiar enough to need no explanation.
- A pint means two cupsA pint of cubed cooked potato works out at roughly two-thirds of a pound of raw potatoes, or two medium ones. The same volume of minced pickled cauliflower is about a standard jar's worth, drained.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means oil and vinegar beaten with salt and pepper, usually three parts oil to one of vinegar, mixed fresh and used at once.
- Cooked dressingThe alternative is a boiled dressing: egg yolks, mustard, a little flour or butter, vinegar and milk or cream, thickened over hot water and cooled. It is tangier than mayonnaise, and it appears often in books of the period as a cheaper alternative where oil was dear.
- The pickled cauliflower is the whole seasoningThe pickled cauliflower carries much of the seasoning -- Beyond what the dressing itself supplies, no salt, mustard or onion is added; the pickle does that work. Taste the pickle first: a sharp commercial one wants the dressing slackened with extra oil, a mild one wants extra vinegar.
- Choose a waxy potatoBoil in the skins, peel warm, then cut into small dice. A floury baking potato will break down into paste when stirred with the dressing; Yukon Gold or a red-skinned variety holds its cubes.
- Dress warm, serve coldPotato takes up dressing better while it is still warm. The recipe starts from cold boiled potatoes, but tossing them with the dressing before they chill completely, then folding in the cauliflower and refrigerating, still honours 'serve very cold' without leaving the potato bland.
- Stir lightlyWorth taking at face value: a few gentle passes rather than working the salad round the bowl, or the edges of the dice round off and the texture goes.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished salad, enough for four as a side dish.
Salad compendiums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran to dozens of near-identical potato variations, distinguished from one another mostly by a single added ingredient and a decorative name. The names rarely carry any documented connection to the titles they borrow; they were a way of giving a printer's list of recipes variety and a touch of borrowed grandeur. What is real here is the pickled cauliflower, well attested in the period either put up at home in spiced vinegar at the end of summer or bought as part of a mixed pickle. Using it as both vegetable and seasoning is characteristic of how these books worked: cold cooked potato was the cheapest possible base, and the interest came from whatever sharp, well-preserved thing was already on the shelf.