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Potato Salad with Mayonnaise
Boil the potatoes and let cool without paring.
Then remove the skins and cut into slices, balls, or cubes. Squeeze over them a little onion juice, sprinkle with fine-chopped parsley, and let stand in a French dressing several hours. Mix the dressing after the usual formula, and use enough to moisten well the potato. When ready to serve, make nests of heart leaves of lettuce, put a spoonful of the potato in each, with a teaspoonful of mayonnaise above, sprinkle the mayonnaise with capers, and press the quarter of a hard-boiled egg into the top of the mayonnaise. Or add the chopped white of egg to the potato before marinating, and sift the yolk over the mayonnaise.
A composed salad rather than a bowl of dressed potato: the potato is marinated in vinaigrette first, then portioned into lettuce cups and finished with mayonnaise. The order matters more than anything else here.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe hinge of the recipe is the several-hour soak in French dressing. The book says to let the potatoes cool before paring, and cutting them cold keeps the slices intact. If you prefer, dress them while still slightly warm: warm starch is generally held to take up oil and vinegar more readily than cold.
- Choose a waxy potatoSlices, balls and cubes all need a potato that holds its edge. Red-skinned, fingerling or Yukon Gold varieties will survive boiling in the skin and being cut; a floury russet collapses into the dressing.
- French dressing, the 1900 formulaFrench dressing -- In this book that means a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine. Cooking-school formulas of the period run anywhere from about two to four parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in America today.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and squeeze the pulp in a cloth, or press a cut onion against the grater and use what runs. It gives the flavour without pieces of onion in a salad meant to look tidy.
- BallsThe potato balls call for a small melon baller, cut from thickly sliced boiled potato. It is decorative work; cubes taste identical.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise here is uncooked yolk, oil and vinegar or lemon. If it is going to a buffet, or to anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise, which is acidified and stable.
- Assemble lateLettuce cups wilt under dressed potato and mayonnaise slumps at room temperature. Marinate ahead by all means, but fill the nests within half an hour of serving and keep them cold until then.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about 1 1/2 lb of potatoes will fill six to eight lettuce cups as a first course or side. Allow one hard-boiled egg for every four servings if you are using quarters on top.
This was written at the turn of the twentieth century, apparently by Janet McKenzie Hill, for a readership among whom mayonnaise was becoming a mark of refinement — salads were being promoted, in cooking-school circles and the domestic magazines Hill edited, as light, hygienic and modern. The two-stage dressing here is the German-influenced technique that runs through nineteenth-century American potato salad: the potato is first dressed with oil and vinegar, a method generally traced to the Kartoffelsalat of German immigrant kitchens, and only afterwards crowned with the richer emulsion. Capers and the sieved yolk sprinkled over the top belong to a different impulse — the individually plated, garnished service of the lettuce-cup salad, when a salad was expected to arrive looking composed rather than tossed.