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Potato Salad (New potatoes make the best)
New potatoes make the best salad, and if they have been boiled with the jackets on so much the better. Cut them in neat dice shapes. Season well with salt and pepper. To two cups add onehalf teaspoonful onion-juice, if liked; one tablespoonful very finely minced capers, two tablespoonfuls melted butter, and one tablespoonful lemon-juice. Toss all together carefully so as not to break the potatoes. Chill. When ready to serve cover with a cooked salad dressing (see page 75), and arrange on a bed of crisp, white lettuce leaves. Garnish with rings of the white of hardcooked egg, and sift yolk on top.
A left-overs recipe built on the sound principle that potatoes absorb seasoning while still warm. The one thing to get right is the order: dress the dice before they cool, then chill, then add the creamy dressing at the last minute.
- Season while warmSeason before chilling -- The recipe does not say to dress the potatoes warm, but butter and lemon juice are absorbed better by potatoes still warm from boiling, or at least at room temperature, than by fridge-cold ones. If starting from cold potatoes, let them come back to room temperature first.
- Melted butter, not oilButter sets solid when the salad is chilled, which flattens the dressing and coats the mouth. If you want the salad genuinely cold, a neutral oil or a mild olive oil in the same quantity behaves better; if you keep the butter, serve the salad only lightly chilled.
- Two cups of potatoesRoughly 10-12 oz of boiled potatoes once diced, enough for two or three as a side. Waxy varieties hold their dice; floury bakers will crumble at the tossing stage.
- Onion juiceMade by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve, a period trick for onion flavour without visible pieces. Yields are low and variable, so grate more onion than you think you need; finely grated onion or a little shallot does the same job.
- CapersRinse brined capers and pat them dry before mincing, or the salad turns salty once the dressing goes on. Salt-packed capers need a longer soak.
- Cooked salad dressingThe cross-reference is almost certainly to a boiled dressing of the period: egg yolks, vinegar, mustard, sugar and milk or cream thickened over hot water, tangier and looser than mayonnaise. Mayonnaise substitutes directly, thinned with a spoonful of milk or cream.
- Add the dressing lateCover the salad only when ready to serve, as the book says. Dressing left on chilled potatoes for hours goes watery as the potatoes weep.
- The egg garnishSlice the whites of hard-cooked eggs crosswise and push out the centres for rings; press the yolks through a fine sieve over the top. Two eggs is enough for this quantity.
Potato salad dressed with vinegar, oil and herbs appears in English and American cookery well before this book, but the version bound with a thick cooked dressing and set on lettuce reads as characteristically turn-of-the-century American, when the boiled dressing was a standard household salad sauce. The advice to boil potatoes in their jackets is older still and holds up: the skin keeps the flesh from waterlogging, which is exactly what a salad needs.