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Potato and Celery Salad
To two cups boiled potatoes cut in one-half inch cubes add one-half cup finely cut celery and a medium-sized apple, pared, cut in eighths, then eighths cut in thin slices. Marinate with French Dressing. Arrange in a mound and garnish with celery tip and sections of bright red apple.
A cold potato salad in the plainest Fannie Farmer manner: no mayonnaise, only oil and vinegar, with apple for sweetness and celery for crunch. A few points make the difference between a good version and a soggy one.
- Dress the potatoes warmWarm potatoes absorb an oil-and-vinegar dressing far better than cold ones, so it is worth pouring the French dressing over while they are still warm. Note that the recipe as printed adds the celery and apple first and marinates everything together; holding them back until the potatoes have cooled keeps them crisper.
- French Dressing, 1896 senseFrench Dressing, in the sense this book uses -- a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, mixed rather than shaken, and closer to two parts oil to one part vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Something like 1/4 cup should be enough for this quantity.
- Potato choiceUse a waxy or all-purpose potato and boil it in the skin, then peel; a floury baking potato will crumble at the half-inch dice. Two cups of cubes is roughly 3/4 lb of potatoes before cooking.
- Marinate"Marinate" here means let it stand in the dressing, not a quick toss. Half an hour or so at room temperature is enough; long refrigeration will thicken and cloud an olive oil dressing.
- The appleA firm tart apple works best. Slice it last and turn it in the dressing at once; the vinegar slows browning on the cut faces. The garnish sections are left unpared for the red skin, so cut those just before the dish goes to table.
- Garnish and servingThe "celery tip" is the pale leafy top of the stalk, discarded today but worth keeping for this. Mound the salad on lettuce if you like; the quantity serves four as a side.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar rather than boiled dressing or mayonnaise is the older European form, and it is one of the versions Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries, alongside potato salads dressed with mayonnaise. The apple is characteristic of the turn-of-the-century American salad chapter, where fruit was pushed into savoury company to lighten heavy cold plates. The attention paid to the mound and the garnish is equally of its time: the cooking school taught presentation as part of the lesson, and a dish was to reach the table looking composed.