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Potato Salad (III)
INGREDIENTS.
1 quart of cubes of cold ¼ a teaspoonful of paprica. 3 tablespoonfuls of vinegar. 4 tablespoonfuls of oil. boiled potatoes. 1½ teaspoonfuls of salt.
Capers, beets, whites and yolks of eggs, and lettuce. Method. To the potato cubes add the salt, pepper and oil, and mix thoroughly; add the vinegar and mix again. Pile the cubes in a mound in the salad-bowl. Mark out the surface of the mound into quarters with capers; fill in two opposite sections with chopped beet; use chopped whites of eggs in a third, and sifted yolks of eggs in the fourth section. Finish with a border of parsley.
A dressed potato salad built as a decorated mound rather than tossed in a bowl — the garnish pattern is the point of the dish, so cut and cook with that in mind.
- The ingredient list, sorted outThe amounts are 1 quart of cold boiled potato cubes, 1½ teaspoons salt, ¼ teaspoon paprika, 3 tablespoons vinegar and 4 tablespoons oil, with capers, cooked beet, hard-boiled eggs and greens for the garnish. A quart of cubes is roughly 1½ lb of potatoes before peeling.
- Oil before vinegarThe recipe has the oil go on before the vinegar. Cooks often argue that oil-first coats the cubes and keeps them from soaking up the vinegar and going soft, though the recipe itself gives no reason.
- Dress while warmThe recipe says cold potatoes, but potatoes absorb seasoning best when still slightly warm. Cool them only to handling temperature before mixing, then chill the finished mound.
- Cut for structureUse a waxy potato — red-skinned or fingerling — cooked whole in the skin, then peeled and cut into ½-inch cubes. Floury baking potatoes crumble under the mixing and will not hold a mound.
- Paprika, not cayenne"Paprica" here is sweet paprika, used as much for colour as for heat; the recipe does not say what kind. The method line calls it pepper; a quarter teaspoon of paprika is what the list intends.
- Sifted yolksPress the hard-boiled yolks through a fine sieve rather than chopping them. The result is a light powder that sits evenly in its quarter instead of clumping.
- The greensThe ingredients call for lettuce and the method finishes with parsley. Either works: line the bowl with lettuce leaves under the mound, and edge it with parsley.
- YieldA quart of cubes should serve about six as a side salad, or four if it is the main part of a cold plate; the recipe gives no yield.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise is the older form, and it turns up in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often said to follow German or French practice; mayonnaise-bound potato salad is generally held to have become the dominant style later. What ties this version to its moment is the presentation: a smooth mound quartered with capers and filled in with chopped beet, egg white and sieved yolk, an example of the geometric garnishing that late-Victorian and Edwardian cooks applied to cold dishes. Cold salads of the period were often judged on their appearance at table as well as their flavour, and books of this kind set out the pattern as carefully as the seasoning.