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Potatoes and Onions
Boil potatoes in skins, peel while hot and slice; about an hour before wanted, slice onions, and let stand in salt and water; while peeling potatoes, put onions in skillet with a little ham gravy or butter and a little water, and cook slightly; take out, put in vegetable dish a layer of onions, then potatoes, then onions, etc., with potatoes last; add a cup of vinegar to skillet (with ham gravy or butter), warm and pour over.
A warm potato-and-onion salad dressed with a hot vinegar and pan-fat dressing. The whole point is that everything goes together while still hot, so plan the order of work rather than the timings.
- Quantities are left to the cookNo amounts are given beyond the cup of vinegar. As a working ratio, about 2 lb potatoes to 2 medium onions with 1/2 cup vinegar and 3-4 tablespoons of fat serves six; a full cup of vinegar over that quantity is sharp by modern taste.
- The soaking stepStanding sliced onions in salted water for an hour draws out some of the harshness and softens them. Use cold water and a generous tablespoon of salt per quart, then drain well before they hit the pan.
- Ham gravyHere this means the fat and browned drippings left in the skillet after frying ham, not a thickened sauce. Bacon fat is the closest everyday substitute; butter, as the recipe allows, gives a milder result.
- "Cook slightly"The onions should go limp and translucent, three to four minutes, not brown. They finish softening in the residual heat of the layered dish.
- Peel potatoes hotBoiling in the skins keeps them from waterlogging, and the skins slip off easily while hot. Waxy potatoes hold their slices; floury ones will collapse into the dressing.
- Deglaze, do not boilThe vinegar goes into the same skillet to lift the browned bits. Warm it through only, roughly a minute; boiling it down concentrates the acid and drives off the fat's flavour.
- Serve warmThis is a hot-dressed salad of the kind usually associated with German-American cookery, and it is best eaten soon after assembly. Cold, the fat sets and the dish turns waxy.
Warm potato salad bound with hot bacon or ham fat and vinegar rather than mayonnaise is generally traced to German settlement in the United States, and versions of it turn up in nineteenth-century American cookbooks. The Dixie Cook-Book (1883), compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox as a Southern adaptation of her earlier Buckeye Cookery, sits alongside the region's habit of keeping a skillet of ham drippings at hand: the fat that fried breakfast ham becomes the dressing for supper's vegetables. The layering of onion and potato in the serving dish, rather than tossing, may reflect an expectation that a vegetable dish arrive looking composed.