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Potato Salad (II)
(CARRIE M. DEARBORN.) INGREDIENTS. 12 cold boiled potatoes. 4 cooked eggs. 2 small Bermuda onions.
Chopped parsley.
1 saltspoonful of white pepper. 2 teaspoonfuls of salt. 6 tablespoonfuls, each, of oil and vinegar. 1/2 a teaspoonful of powdered sugar.
Method. Cut the potatoes into dice and chop the eggs fine. Chop the onions, or slice them very thin. Sprinkle the potatoes, eggs and onions with the salt and pepper, and mix thoroughly. Pour the oil gradually over the mixture, stirring and tossing continually; lastly, mix with the other ingredients the vinegar, in which the sugar has been dissolved. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the top.
A vinaigrette-dressed potato salad of the sort that predates the mayonnaise version, from Carrie M. Dearborn of the Boston cooking-school circuit. Two details in the original need translating, and one point of technique decides whether the salad tastes seasoned or bland.
- Dress the potatoes while warmThe recipe calls for cold boiled potatoes, most likely leftovers, but warm potato takes up oil and vinegar more readily than cold. If you are boiling them for the purpose, dice and season them while still hot and let the salad cool in the dressing.
- A saltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. The saltspoon was a real object, the smallest spoon in a Victorian flatware service, and cookbooks of the 1890s used it as a standard measure.
- Twelve potatoesAn unhelpful count by modern standards. Assume medium boiling potatoes at about 4 oz each, so roughly 3 lb. Waxy potatoes hold their dice; russets will collapse into the dressing.
- Cooked eggsHard-boiled, yolks fully set, then chopped fine as directed; the finer the chop, the more the egg works through the dressing.
- Bermuda onionsA large, flat, mild sweet onion originally shipped from Bermuda; the name outlived the trade and is now little used. Use a sweet onion such as Vidalia or Walla Walla; two small ones is about 1 cup chopped. A regular yellow onion will dominate everything.
- The oilOlive oil was the usual salad oil of this period, though cottonseed oil was also sold for the purpose. Pouring it gradually while tossing coats the potato evenly before the vinegar goes in.
- Powdered sugarIn this period a finely ground sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar; the point is that it dissolves readily in the cold vinegar. Granulated sugar works if you stir until clear.
- Seasoning and yieldTwo teaspoons of salt for 3 lb of potatoes is about right, but taste after the salad has stood 30 minutes, as potato mutes salt. Serves 8 to 10 as a side dish.
Potato salad is generally traced to German and Austrian practice, where the dressing is oil, vinegar and onion rather than mayonnaise, and this version is squarely in that older line: no boiled dressing, no mayonnaise, the chopped hard-boiled egg doing the work of enriching and binding. Carrie M. Dearborn is said to have been a Boston cooking teacher and demonstrator in the 1890s, and her appearance here as a named contributor reflects how such books were assembled, out of the lecture circuit and the domestic-science schools rather than from one author's kitchen. The Bermuda onion in the ingredient list points to the decades when Bermuda's onion trade supplied the eastern American market with a mild sweet onion, a staple for roughly forty years.