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Potato Salad II
Mix two cups cold boiled riced potatoes and one cup pecan nut meats broken in pieces. Marinate with French Dressing, and arrange on a bed of watercress.
A three-ingredient salad that depends entirely on texture and on the dressing, neither of which the original bothers to specify. A few notes before you start.
- Riced, not dicedPushing boiled potatoes through a ricer gives a light, crumbly heap rather than the cubes most people expect in potato salad. Use a floury potato (russet or similar), boil it whole in its skin, peel while warm and rice it directly into the bowl. Waxy potatoes turn gluey under a ricer.
- Dress while warmWarm potato absorbs vinaigrette; cold potato sheds it. The book specifies "cold boiled," but the salad is far better if the riced potato is still tepid when the dressing goes on.
- What French Dressing meant hereIn this book it is a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, stirred together in a bowl, with no mustard, sugar or emulsifier; the proportion is roughly two parts oil to one part vinegar. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in America.
- Quantity of dressingNone is given. About a third of a cup of vinaigrette will coat two cups of riced potato; add it in stages and fold with a fork, since riced potato collapses into paste if stirred hard.
- Pecans"Nut meats" simply means shelled kernels. Toast them dry in a 350F oven for six to eight minutes and cool before mixing, or they will taste flat against the vinegar. Break them by hand rather than chopping, as the recipe intends visible pieces.
- WatercressA bed, not a garnish to be pushed aside. Dress the cress lightly with a spoonful of the same vinaigrette just before serving so it does not wilt under the potato.
- YieldTwo cups of potato and one of pecans serves four as a side, or two as a light luncheon salad.
Potato salad in American cookbooks is generally credited to German and Austrian influence, where warm potato dressed with vinegar and oil was long standard, and the numbering of this recipe marks it as one of more than one version in the book. The pecan is the American contribution: a native nut that turns up throughout turn-of-the-century salad chapters, and whose commercial cultivation in Southern orchards expanded in this period. The salad also reflects the era's taste for arranging food on beds of greens, and watercress was among the common salad greens of the day.