Potato Salad
Slice and cut in pieces 1 quart of cold boiled potatoes, 1 small onion and 3 hard boiled eggs. Season to taste. Mix together. Use for dressing ½ pint of vinegar sweetened to taste, 1 teaspoon of mustard, a lump of butter the size of an egg, 1 tablespoon of cream. Let this come to the boiling point, and pour over the ingredients; after stirring well garnish with slices of hard boiled eggs.
A boiled dressing potato salad of the old German-American type, served warm rather than mayonnaise-bound. The measurements are by volume and by eye, which is workable once you translate them.
- Quantities in plain termsA quart of sliced cooked potato is roughly 1.5 lb of potatoes before cooking, or four to five medium ones. Half a pint of vinegar is one cup; butter "the size of an egg" is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- A cup of vinegar is a lotHousehold vinegar of this period was not standardised the way the 5% cider vinegar sold now is, and may have been weaker or stronger. Start with half the vinegar, cut with water or potato cooking liquid, and add more once you have tasted it.
- "Sweetened to taste"For a cup of vinegar, two to four tablespoons of sugar brings it into the familiar sweet-sour range. Add it before heating so it dissolves.
- MustardA teaspoon of mustard here most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared. If you use prepared mustard instead, allow about a tablespoon.
- The dressing will not thickenThere is no flour or egg yolk in it, so this stays a hot vinaigrette rather than a creamy sauce. Bring it just to a boil, no further, or the tablespoon of cream may separate against the acid.
- Potatoes want to be warmCold potato absorbs very little. Reheat the sliced potato gently, or better, dress it while still warm from boiling, then let it sit twenty minutes before serving.
- Potato typeA waxy potato holds its slices; a floury baking potato will collapse into the hot dressing. Boil whole in the skin and peel afterwards for the cleanest pieces.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" means salt and black pepper, and this dish needs more salt than seems reasonable to balance the vinegar and sugar.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and is better on the second day, though the onion sharpens.
Hot potato salad dressed with a boiled vinegar-and-fat mixture came to American cookbooks through German immigrant kitchens, where the pattern is generally traced to Kartoffelsalat dressed with hot bacon drippings and vinegar. The butter-and-cream version here is the assimilated form: no bacon, no pork fat, just what would already be on the shelf. The mayonnaise-bound cold potato salad that dominates now became common only after commercial mayonnaise was widely available in the 1910s and 1920s, which is why a recipe from this period reaches for a cooked dressing instead.