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French Potato Salad
Slice some cold boiled potatoes into a salad bowl, sprinkle over them some parsley and a small quantitiy of onions cut very fine, and then pour over a sauce made of the following ingredients: mustard, pepper, and salt, and a small quantity of vinegar, rub well together before pouring in some fine olive oil, whip all till the sauce looks creamy.
A plain vinaigrette-dressed potato salad, written for cooks who already knew how to build a dressing. The only real technique here is the emulsion, and the recipe's own phrasing tells you the order to work in.
- Emulsify before the oil goes inThe instruction to "rub well together before pouring in some fine olive oil" is the hinge. Work the mustard, salt, pepper and vinegar into a smooth paste first, then add the oil in a thin stream while whisking, or it will separate rather than turn creamy.
- Proportions, since none are givenA workable dressing for about 2 lb of potatoes: 1 teaspoon mustard, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 6 tablespoons olive oil, salt and pepper. The ratio is roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar.
- MustardThis most likely meant dry mustard powder, which thickens the dressing and helps hold the emulsion, though prepared mustard was also available. Prepared Dijon works and does the same job; ballpark yellow mustard does not give the same result.
- Potatoes warm, not coldThe recipe says cold boiled potatoes, which is a leftovers instruction. Potatoes absorb dressing far better while still warm, so if you are cooking them for this purpose, slice and dress them while they can still be handled.
- Onion"A small quantity cut very fine" is doing real work here. Use a shallot or a couple of tablespoons of finely minced mild onion; raw onion in a salad that sits for an hour will take over everything else.
- Potato varietyA waxy potato holds its slices. A floury baking potato will collapse into the dressing, which makes a decent mash but not this salad.
- Yield and restingTwo pounds of potatoes serves six as a side dish. Let it stand 20 to 30 minutes at room temperature before serving so the dressing is absorbed, and season again at the end, since cooled potato flattens salt.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise appears to be the older of the two forms, and nineteenth-century American cookbooks often labelled such a salad "French" to distinguish it from the boiled- or cooked-dressing salads more usual in English-speaking kitchens. The name simply signals the dressing: what the period called French dressing was mustard, vinegar, oil and seasoning whisked to a cream, and it appears under that heading in a number of household books of the era. The absence of quantities is typical of the community-compiled charity cookbooks of the period, in which recipes were written down the way one cook would tell another, assuming shared knowledge of how much vinegar was enough.