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Potato Salad Plain
1 pint bowl of cooked and sliced potatoes. 1 small onion, sliced or chopped. 1/2 cupful of vinegar. Parsley, salt, pepper. 1 tablespoonful of salad oil, or of fried bac n fat.
Mix all together by pouring from one bowl to another and shaking up.
A German-style warm potato salad stripped to its bones: potato, onion, vinegar, fat. The proportions are generous with acid, so the dressing is the thing to watch.
- "1 pint bowl"Two cups of sliced cooked potato, or somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of a pound of whole potatoes before cooking. Waxy varieties hold their slices; russets will collapse into the shaking step.
- Dress them warmDressing them warm -- The recipe says nothing either way, though the fried bacon fat suggests it. Warm potatoes absorb vinegar and fat; cold ones simply get coated and taste sharp on the surface.
- Half a cup of vinegarThat is a very acidic dressing by current taste, and vinegar strength was less standardised then than now. Start with a quarter cup, taste, and add more rather than committing all of it.
- Salad oilIn American cookbooks of this period the term covered any mild table oil, olive and cottonseed among them. Any neutral oil works; the bacon fat alternative gives the more traditional flavor and is worth using if you have it.
- OnionRaw and undiluted here. If your onion is strong, rinse the slices in cold water and pat dry, or use scallion.
- "Pouring from one bowl to another"A deliberate technique, not carelessness. Tossing with a spoon breaks cooked potato slices; pouring and shaking coats them with less damage. Two wide bowls make it manageable.
- YieldTwo cups of dressed potato, enough for two or three as a side dish. Probably best eaten soon after making, while still slightly warm.
Potato salad dressed with vinegar and hot bacon fat rather than mayonnaise is the older of the two American traditions, carried by German-speaking immigrants and firmly established in the Midwest and Pennsylvania by the time this book was printed. The recipe's brevity is typical of professional books of the era, which gave only the proportions that were easy to get wrong. Mayonnaise-bound potato salad became the American default later, as commercial mayonnaise turned cheap and reliable in the 1910s and 1920s.