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Hot Potato Salad
Wash six medium-sized potatoes, and cook in boiling salted water until soft. Cool, remove skins, and cut in very thin slices. Cover bottom of baking-dish with potatoes, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with finely chopped celery, then with finely chopped parsley. Mix two tablespoons each tarragon and cider vinegar and four tablespoons olive oil, and add one slice lemon cut one-third inch thick. Bring to boiling-point, pour over potatoes, cover, and let stand in oven until thoroughly warmed.
A warm vinaigrette potato salad rather than a mayonnaise one, and it depends entirely on the potatoes being sliced thin enough to drink the dressing while still warm.
- The hingeSlice the potatoes as thin as you can manage; the recipe cools them first so the skins slip and the slices hold together. Thin slices absorb the boiling dressing; thick chunks shed it and leave a puddle in the dish.
- Potato choiceUse a waxy or all-purpose potato — Yukon Gold, red bliss, fingerling. A floury baking potato will collapse into mash when you slice and turn it. Six medium potatoes is roughly 2 lb.
- Cook them whole and unpeeledCook them in their skins -- The recipe implies this rather than stating it: the skins are removed only after cooking and cooling, and they slip off easily at that point.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only "until thoroughly warmed." A covered dish at 300F for 15 to 20 minutes does it. Anything hotter dries the top layer and cooks the parsley to brown.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, though less commonly. If you cannot find it, steep a few sprigs of fresh tarragon in warmed cider vinegar for twenty minutes and strain, or use white wine vinegar with chopped tarragon added to the potatoes.
- The lemon sliceA third of an inch is unusually thick, and the recipe specifies it without saying why. It is brought to the boil with the oil and vinegar as a flavouring; the recipe does not say whether to leave it in the dish.
- Dressing proportionsFour tablespoons oil to four tablespoons vinegar is sharp by modern habit. Taste before pouring and add oil if you want it rounder, but the acidity is the point of a hot potato salad.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. Best within an hour of assembly; refrigerated, the olive oil congeals and the dish needs rewarming rather than serving cold.
Hot potato salad dressed with vinegar and oil rather than mayonnaise is the older form, generally traced through German and Alsatian cooking, where warm potatoes are turned in a hot bacon-and-vinegar dressing. One version drops the bacon and reaches instead for olive oil, tarragon vinegar and a slice of lemon — the vocabulary of the French-influenced American cooking school. The tarragon vinegar is a period marker: flavoured vinegars were a staple of well-stocked turn-of-the-century pantries. Putting the assembled dish in the oven to warm through, rather than tossing everything in a bowl on the stove, points to a taste for the orderly, presentable baking-dish.