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Best Potato Salad
Favorite hotel supper dish. 2 quarts of boiled potatoes. 1 small onion. 2 tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley.
The popular salad dressing of the preceding receipt. Slice or break the potatoes, mince the onion extremely small, mix, pour the dressing over and combine thoroughly by turning the salad from one bowl to another three or four times. Throw the fresh chopped parsley into it just before serving. The whites of the eggs may be added, cut in strips. The foregoing is the formula, the rut to run in, but how shall we infuse life into it or explain the particular knack which makes one person's potato salad so utterly unlike and superior to another's? Cold potatoes which have remained in the dinner steamers three hours, then are peeled and sliced, may do--the dressing will carry the burden of their inferiority, but they are not best. Take new potatoes if you can, if not, good mealy old ones, pare and divide in large pieces. Throw them in cold salted water and boil about half an hour, or till just done. Drain the water from them and break the largest pieces apart with a twist of a fork. When nearly cold mix the dressing with the potatoes and set the bowl on ice till wanted.
We obtain the best salads with the least fuss when we can get those trifling cooks, two or more of them, to run a rivalry with each other who can make the best. The last described dressing is a little tedious, being a double compound of cooked and raw. The person dishing up vegetables during the slow latter end of dinner generally can prepare it between times to be ready for the next meal.
All these salad dressings are susceptible of improvement by added flavorings, and the epicure gets in his extra harmonies in that way. Not to confuse our directions we will treat of the flavoring complications by themselves in a special chapter.
A scarcity of eggs often makes us employ a salad dressing that can be made without any, for hotel meals go on incessantly, but another reason for the following being kept in mind is its whiteness to contrast with the preceding kinds, which are all yellow.
A hotel cook's potato salad, written for a kitchen turning out supper for a hundred. The instructions assume you have already made the dressing from the preceding page, and the real content of the entry is the argument about potatoes rather than the ratios.
- The hinge: dress the potatoes warmThe hinge: dress the potatoes before they are stone cold -- Whitehead says to mix the dressing in when the potatoes are nearly cold. Potato that still holds a little warmth takes up dressing more readily than fully chilled potato.
- The missing dressing"The popular salad dressing of the preceding receipt" is described here only as "a double compound of cooked and raw," i.e. a cooked dressing with raw elements worked in. Any boiled dressing or a thinned mayonnaise will serve; the egg whites called for at the end are presumably left over from a dressing that used the yolks.
- QuantityTwo quarts of cooked potato pieces is roughly 3 lb or so of potatoes before peeling, enough for eight to ten as a side. Around a cup of dressing is a reasonable starting point.
- Potato choice"Mealy old ones" are high-starch bakers, which break up and drink dressing but turn to mash if overcooked. New potatoes hold their shape and are the author's first choice. Waxy yellow potatoes are the easiest modern compromise.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour applies to large pared chunks started in cold salted water. Test from 15 minutes on; a knife should meet slight resistance at the centre when you drain, since the potatoes keep cooking as they steam dry.
- "Set the bowl on ice"Refrigerate. Dressed potato salad should not sit at room temperature for more than a couple of hours.
- Onion and parsleyOne small onion for 3 lb of potato is restrained by modern habit; mince it as finely as he insists or it dominates. The parsley goes in at the last moment so it stays green rather than bleeding into the dressing.
- "Turning from one bowl to another"A folding method, not stirring — it coats the pieces without smearing them. A wide bowl and a rubber spatula do the same job.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the men and women who cooked in American hotels and restaurants in the 1880s and 1890s, and the asides here — dinner steamers, the vegetable cook filling dead time between services, "a scarcity of eggs" because "hotel meals go on incessantly" — are as much the point as the recipe. Potato salad is often said to have reached American tables through German immigrant cooking in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by Whitehead's day the cold dressed version was familiar hotel supper fare, distinct from the warm vinegar-and-bacon style still called German potato salad. His complaint about potatoes left three hours in the steamer is a working chef's grievance: hotel kitchens produced enormous quantities of boiled potato at dinner, and the supper salad was the obvious use for the surplus. He is arguing, in effect, against treating it as a leftover dish.