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Hot Potato Salad
2 cups cold potato 1 tablespoonful Tarcubes ragon vinegar 2 tablespoonfuls 2 tablespoonfuls cream bacon, cut fine 1 tablespoonful cider vinegar 1 teaspoonful scraped onion
A German-style warm potato salad built from cold boiled potatoes, dressed with bacon, cream and two vinegars. The quantities are clear even though the working method is not spelled out.
- The dressing is the whole dishRender the finely cut bacon, add the scraped onion to the hot fat for a few seconds, then the two vinegars, then the cream off the heat. Pour it over the potato while both are warm so the cubes drink it in; a cold potato coated with cold dressing stays bland.
- Cold potato is the pointPotatoes boiled the day before and chilled have firmed up and will hold a half-inch cube without crumbling. Two cups of cubes is roughly three medium boiled potatoes.
- Scraped onionA period technique: cut an onion across and scrape the cut face with a spoon or knife edge to collect pulp and juice without any pieces. A teaspoon of that is sharper and wetter than a teaspoon of minced onion, so mince finer than usual if substituting.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, though a commercial bottle may well differ in strength and character from a home-steeped nineteenth-century one. Start with two teaspoons of the pair of vinegars, taste, and add the rest.
- CreamTwo tablespoons of cream in a hot acid dressing can look broken. Use heavy cream, add it off the heat, and do not let the pan boil afterwards.
- Heat it through, brieflyWarm the dressed potato in the bacon pan for a minute or two, turning gently with a spatula rather than stirring, or the cubes break down into mash.
- YieldTwo cups of potato serves two as a side dish. Season with salt and pepper at the end -- the bacon carries most of the salt, and how much depends on the bacon.
Left-over cookery was a genre of its own in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household cooked potatoes by the pot and expected the surplus to reappear rather than be thrown out. Hot potato salad dressed with bacon fat and vinegar rather than mayonnaise is generally traced to German cooking and travelled into American kitchens with German immigration through the nineteenth century; the cream here is a softening touch, and the pairing of tarragon with cider vinegar reflects a period fondness for flavoured vinegars, which were often steeped at home from herbs in the kitchen garden.