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Parsley
Cook bacon, add onion, then potatoes, vinegar, cream, and one full teaspoonful minced parsley.
Heat through and serve. Garnish with sprigs of parsley. A little chopped cooked beet is an addition to this salad. Rice, Beet, and Celery Salad Use equal quantities of cooked rice and cooked beets cut into cubes, and as much celery (cut very fine) as will equal the quantity of rice and beets together. Season. Serve with cooked salad dressing (see page 75), and garnish with celery tips and leaves.
Two salads run together here: the tail end of a hot German-style potato salad, and a complete rice, beet and celery salad. Both are built from cold cooked leftovers, so the quantities are deliberately loose.
- The missing head of the first recipeThe potato salad begins mid-sentence; its opening, presumably with the quantities, fell earlier on the page or on the one before. Read it as: bacon rendered in a skillet, onion softened in the fat, sliced cooked potatoes added, then vinegar and cream stirred in and the whole warmed through, as the text says. Figure roughly 4 slices bacon, 1 small onion, 1 lb cooked potatoes, 3 tablespoons vinegar and 3 tablespoons cream.
- Cream and vinegar togetherAcid added to cream over direct heat can curdle it. Warm the dressing gently and only until it steams; the book's "heat through" suggests no more than that.
- Waxy potatoesLeftover boiled or steamed potatoes of a waxy type hold their cubes in the vinegar. Floury baking potatoes will break down into a mash once they are stirred with dressing.
- Cooked salad dressingThe dressing on page 75 is not reproduced here, but "cooked salad dressing" in American cookbooks of the period generally meant a boiled dressing: eggs, vinegar, a little flour or cornstarch, mustard and butter, thickened over hot water. It is usually tangier than mayonnaise. Any modern boiled dressing works, and a thinned mayonnaise sharpened with vinegar and mustard is a fair substitute.
- Beets will bleedCubed cooked beets tint rice and celery pink within minutes. Dress the beets separately and fold them in at the table if you want the three components to stay distinct.
- "Season"Taken for granted here: salt and pepper, and for the rice salad a little vinegar or lemon before the dressing goes on. Season the rice while it is still slightly warm if you can.
- YieldThe potato salad as reconstructed serves four as a side. The rice salad, made with a cup each of rice and beets and two cups of celery, serves four to six.
- Leftover rice safetyCooked rice held at room temperature can support Bacillus cereus. Chill it promptly after cooking and use it within a day for a cold salad.
Books of this kind belong to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens from the 1890s through the Second World War: the leftover cookery manual, which treated the reuse of cooked food as a moral duty as much as a domestic economy. The hot potato salad with bacon and vinegar is the German-American version, carried into mainstream American cooking through Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and it is often said to be at its best made from potatoes cooked the day before. The rice, beet and celery salad is more characteristic of the era's own invention: three cold cooked things cut to matching size, bound with a boiled dressing, and dressed up with leaves. Celery tips and parsley sprigs were the standard garnishes of the period, cheap, green and always to hand.