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Cheese and Romaine
• potatoes until well done but not too soft; slice them while hot, and add about two dessertspoons of oil and two tablespoons of vinegar. Chop one small onion and a little celery very fine, and add, together with two dessertspoons of capers, a little chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour a thin mayonnaise sauce over the potatoes, mixing thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Garnish with lettuce, a few pieces of lemon, and cut beets.
The page is a printing casualty: the heading belongs to a cheese-and-romaine salad, while the text that follows is the tail end of a German-style potato salad, its opening words (and its potato quantity) lost with the previous line. What survives is workable if you supply the missing first step.
- The missing openingThe recipe begins mid-sentence; the lost words would have given the cooking instruction and the quantity of potatoes, neither of which survives. Boil them in their skins until "well done but not too soft" -- a knife should meet slight resistance -- and judge the quantity against the dressing amounts that follow.
- Dress them hotThis is the hinge. Slicing and dressing while the potatoes are still steaming lets them drink the oil and vinegar; cooled potatoes shed dressing and taste flat.
- DessertspoonsA dessertspoon is about two teaspoons, so "two dessertspoons of oil" is roughly 4 teaspoons, or a scant 1 1/2 tablespoons. The capers measure the same.
- VinegarThe recipe specifies only "vinegar." Cider or white wine vinegar suits the dish; distilled white vinegar tastes plainer and harsher, so add it cautiously and taste.
- "A thin mayonnaise"Period mayonnaise was often loosened with cream, vinegar or a little water to a pouring consistency, though this recipe does not say how. Thin jarred mayonnaise with a spoonful of the potato cooking water or a splash of vinegar so it coats rather than clings.
- The wooden spoonThe recipe specifies a wooden spoon, and it asks you to mix thoroughly; use a light hand even so, since hot slices break down easily.
- Beets and lemonThe cut beets are cooked and cold, added at the last moment; stirred in early they stain the whole bowl pink.
- YieldThe potato quantity is missing, so the yield cannot be recovered from the text. Serve barely warm or at room temperature rather than chilled hard.
Potato salad dressed hot with oil and vinegar, then enriched with mayonnaise, capers and onion, arrived in American cookbooks through German and French kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 it had become standard household fare. The garnish here — lettuce leaves, lemon wedges, cut beets — reflects the period's insistence that a salad be composed and colored for the table rather than simply tossed. Capers were an imported pantry staple in bottles, and it is easy to imagine, though hard to document, that they were one of the small luxuries a middle-class kitchen kept on hand to lift plain vegetables.