Potato Salad
Boil four large Irish potatoes, peel and mash smooth; mince two onions, and add to the potato, make a dressing of the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, one small tea-cup of vinegar, one tea-spoon black pepper, one dessert-spoon each of celery seeds and salt, one tablespoon each of prepared mustard and melted butter; mix well with potato, and garnish with slices of egg and celery or lettuce. Or, chop cold boiled potatoes fine with enough raw onions to season nicely; make a dressing as for lettuce salad, and pour over it. - Mrs. James A. Jennings, Nashville, Tennessee.
A Southern potato salad from the era before mayonnaise was a jar on the shelf: the binder is hard-boiled yolk, vinegar, mustard and butter, and the potatoes are mashed rather than cubed. The result is closer to a spread than to a modern picnic salad.
- Irish potatoesSimply ordinary white potatoes, named to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, which in the nineteenth-century South were often the default "potato." Any floury variety works, since they are going to be mashed.
- A small tea-cup of vinegarPeriod tea-cups were not standardised, but are usually reckoned at somewhere around 6 fl oz, and that much vinegar over four potatoes is aggressively sharp by current taste. Add it in stages and stop when the salad tastes right; the potatoes should be moist, not soupy.
- Dessert-spoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. A full dessert-spoon of salt is defensible for four large potatoes, but a full dessert-spoon of celery seed is very assertive as written; half that is plenty for most palates.
- Making the dressingMash the three cooked yolks to a paste with the mustard and the melted butter first, then work in the vinegar a little at a time. Reversed, the yolks stay grainy and the dressing separates.
- Butter temperatureThe butter is best melted but not hot, and the potatoes still warm when the dressing goes on. Cold potatoes tend to set the butter into flecks and take up the vinegar less readily.
- Raw onionTwo whole onions minced raw is a lot of bite for four potatoes. Onion strength varies widely by variety; if yours are strong, use one, or rinse the mince in cold water and squeeze it dry.
- The second version"A dressing as for lettuce salad" sends the reader to whatever the book's lettuce dressing was; in cookbooks of this period that could be a simple vinegar-and-oil with salt and pepper, or a cooked dressing thickened with egg. Either way it is the lighter and quicker of the two versions.
- Yield and servingFour large potatoes should give roughly four to six modest servings. Serve at room temperature rather than chilled, since the butter in the dressing stiffens in the refrigerator; if made ahead, let it stand out for half an hour and taste for salt again.
Potato salad is generally traced to American cookbooks by way of German and Austrian kitchens, where warm potatoes dressed with vinegar, fat and onion are usually said to predate any creamy version, and the vinegar-and-mustard style here often figures as the older line of descent. What marks this as a nineteenth-century recipe is the dressing built on sieved hard-boiled yolk: commercial mayonnaise was not yet on grocery shelves, and cooked-yolk dressings gave the same richness without the trouble of emulsifying raw eggs by hand. The Dixie Cook Book, like most community compilations of its period, credits its contributors by name and town, and Mrs. Jennings of Nashville offers two versions in one entry u2014 the elaborate mashed salad for company, and a plain chopped one for using up cold boiled potatoes.