Home › Salad Dressings › Potato Salad (IV)
Potato Salad (IV)
(German Style.) INGREDIENTS.
1 quart of potato slices or cubes. 2 hard boiled eggs. About 1/2 a cup of beef broth.
1 teaspoonful of salt. 1/2 a teaspoonful of paprica. 8 tablespoonfuls of oil.
1 tablespoonful of grated onion. 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar.
1 teaspoonful of mustard.
1 teaspoonful of sugar.
Fine chopped parsley. (1 cup of mushrooms.) Method.-Boil the potatoes without paring. German potatoes, which are waxy rather than mealy, may be procured in large cities especially for salads. Peel the potatoes and cut them while hot into slices or cubes; pour over them as much beef broth as they will readily absorb and sprinkle with the salt and pepper, the oil and onion; mix lightly and set aside for some hours. Then add the whites of the eggs chopped fine, the yolks passed through a sieve, and mix with the rest of the oil, stirred with the vinegar into the mustard and sugar. After disposing in the dish, sprinkle with the parsley. If mushrooms be at hand, simmer ten or fifteen minutes in broth, break in pieces, and add to the salad with the egg.
SALADS, LARGELY VEGETABLE, SERVED WITH MAYONNAISE,
A hot-dressed German Kartoffelsalat written for cooks who could still buy waxy potatoes as a distinct commodity. The one thing that matters: the broth and oil go on while the potatoes are still hot, so they absorb rather than sit in the dressing.
- Potatoes"German potatoes, waxy rather than mealy" means a low-starch boiling or salad potato — red-skinned varieties, fingerlings, or anything sold for salads; Yukon Gold is all-purpose but will hold up. Mealy russets will collapse into the broth. A quart of slices or cubes is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of whole potatoes.
- Peel them hotBoiling in the skin and peeling while hot is not fussiness; skin-on potatoes take up less water and stay intact, and the hot flesh drinks the broth. Hold each one in a cloth and slip the skin off with a paring knife.
- The oil is split, and the split is not statedEight tablespoons of oil are listed; some goes onto the hot potatoes and "the rest" into the vinegar dressing later. The original never divides it. Half and half works — 4 tablespoons hot, 4 whisked with the vinegar, mustard and sugar.
- Paprica and "pepper"Paprika is the only pepper in the ingredient list, so the instruction to sprinkle with "salt and pepper" means the half teaspoon of paprika. Use sweet paprika rather than smoked, which is a Spanish product and out of place in this dish.
- Beef brothAbout half a cup, and the real instruction is "as much as they will readily absorb" — pour it on warm, in stages, and stop when the potatoes stop taking it. Unsalted or low-sodium stock, since a full teaspoon of salt follows.
- "Set aside for some hours"This is the resting stage that makes the salad; the recipe says only "some hours", so give it a couple of hours at cool room temperature to take on the broth and onion. If you refrigerate it, bring it back toward room temperature before dressing and serving.
- MushroomsTen to fifteen minutes' simmering in broth suits the field or button mushrooms of the period. Cultivated creminis are done in five or six minutes and turn slack past that.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. Add the parsley only at the table; it darkens quickly in an acidic dressing.
German potato salad is dressed with broth, oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise, and served warm or at room temperature — a distinction this book preserves by filing it just before the section headed "salads, largely vegetable, served with mayonnaise." The detail worth noticing is the aside that waxy "German potatoes" could be bought "in large cities especially for salads": at the turn of the twentieth century American markets sold potatoes largely undifferentiated by variety, and a cook who wanted one that held its shape evidently had to know where to look. Recipes of this kind traveled with the very large German-speaking migration to the United States in the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s routinely tag dishes "German style" as a shorthand their readers understood. The technique itself — hot potatoes soaking up stock before any acid touches them — remains familiar in Germany, though chiefly as a southern practice; northern Kartoffelsalat is commonly dressed with mayonnaise.