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Potato-and-Nasturtium Salad
(E. J. MCKENZIE.) INGREDIENTS.
1 quart of potatoes, cut in cubes. 1/2 a cup of chopped gherkins.
1 cup of tender nasturtium shoots, cut in bits. 2 tablespoonfuls of pickled nasturtium seeds.
Onion juice or garlic. 6 tablespoonfuls of oil. 5 tablespoonfuls of vinegar.
Salt and pepper.
Chopped parsley.
Method. - Mix the potatoes, gherkins, nasturtium shoots and seeds in a bowl rubbed over with garlic; add the oil, vinegar and seasonings, and mix again. Pile in a mound on a serving-dish, dust with chopped parsley, and garnish with a wreath of nasturtium blossoms and leaves.
A cold potato salad built around nasturtium, which the period treated as a kitchen herb rather than a bedding flower. The original assumes you know the potatoes are already cooked.
- The potatoesA quart of cubes is roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of potatoes, boiled in their skins until just tender, then peeled and diced. Waxy varieties hold their edges; mealy ones will break down into the dressing.
- Dress them warmThe recipe is silent on this, but warm potato absorbs oil and vinegar more readily than cold. If you mix while the cubes are still steaming, let the salad come to room temperature before garnishing.
- Nasturtium shootsThe young stems and leaf stalks, cut into short lengths. They are peppery, closer to watercress than to lettuce. Use only unsprayed plants, and pick before the shoots turn stringy in high summer.
- Pickled nasturtium seedsThe green seed pods, brined and put up in vinegar, long used as a domestic stand-in for capers. If you have none, drained capers are the accepted substitute at the same measure.
- GherkinsIn this period the word means small sour cucumbers in vinegar, not the sweet pickle sold under the name today. Sweet gherkins will throw the whole salad off balance.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a teaspoon or so is enough. It seasons without leaving raw onion texture in a salad meant to be smooth-edged.
- The dressing ratioSix oil to five vinegar is very sharp by current practice. It suits hot potato, which drinks acid, but taste as you go and hold some vinegar back if yours is a strong one.
- Flowers as garnishThe wreath of blossoms and leaves is edible, but only from plants you know have not been treated. Add it at the last moment, since the petals wilt quickly once they touch the dressing.
- YieldServes six as a side dish, or four as a light lunch salad.
Nasturtium earned its place in old kitchen gardens for reasons beyond its color: the leaves and shoots gave a cress-like pepperiness, and the green seed pods, pickled in vinegar, were the standard household substitute for imported capers, a practice found in English sources by the late seventeenth century and still recommended in American manuals well into the twentieth century. The recipe's other habits are equally of its time: the bowl rubbed with garlic instead of garlic in the salad, onion contributed as pressed juice rather than as chopped onion, and a nearly equal-parts oil-and-vinegar dressing that a modern palate reads as bracing.