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Sweet Potato Salad
Three large sweet potatoes, two stalks of celery, French dressing, olives, parsley.
Boil the potatoes; cut into squares; add the celery, cut small. Pour over French dressing. Garnish with olives and parsley.
A four-line recipe that depends almost entirely on how the potatoes are cooked and when they are dressed.
- Dress the potatoes warmSweet potato takes up vinaigrette more readily while it is still hot from the pot; once chilled, the dressing tends to sit on the surface. Cut and dress while warm, then cool, and fold the celery in at the end so it stays crisp.
- Boil in the skinsWhole, unpeeled potatoes hold their shape and do not waterlog. Simmer until a skewer meets slight resistance at the centre — roughly 25-35 minutes for large ones — and slip the skins off while warm. Sweet potato goes from firm to collapsed in a couple of minutes, so test early.
- "Two stalks of celery""stalk" in books of this period can mean either a single rib or the whole head. Two ribs, diced small, is the likelier reading against three potatoes.
- French dressing, as meant hereNot the sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken. Around half a cup dresses this quantity. A little mustard or a squeeze of lemon keeps it from reading flat against the sugar in the potatoes.
- Sweet potato, not yamThree large sweet potatoes is roughly 2 to 2 1/4 lb. The orange-fleshed, moist varieties sold as "yams" in American shops are sweet potatoes; the drier pale-fleshed sort holds its cubes better in a salad.
- The olivesMost likely whole olives in brine, stoned or not. Rinse them briefly if they are very salty, since the dressing is already seasoned.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. Best at cool room temperature rather than straight from the refrigerator, where the oil stiffens and the flavour closes up.
Salad books of the late Victorian and Edwardian period were largely exercises in taking a cooked vegetable, cubing it, and pouring French dressing over it — the same treatment given here to beets, string beans, potatoes and asparagus in book after book. The novelty in this one is the sweet potato, a Southern staple that reached Northern tables mostly candied or baked, and its appearance in a chilled salad may reflect the era's appetite for new applications for familiar produce, though that is inference rather than anything the book says. "French dressing" in these collections is simply oil and vinegar, distinguished from "mayonnaise dressing" and from the cooked, boiled dressings that thrifty households used when oil was expensive; the modern sweetened bottled product carrying the name is a later development, however far it has drifted from its origin. The olives are worth noting as a marker of class and date — they turn up as garnish throughout these books precisely because they signalled a well-appointed table.Book: ninety nine salads Title: Sweet Potato Salad Section: Recipes