Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › M. a. T (Slice cold boiled potatoes)
M. a. T (Slice cold boiled potatoes)
Slice cold boiled potatoes ; almonds blanched and quartered; hickory nuts, if liked (both of these may be omitted). A very small quantity of chopped onions; pour over this any good salad dressing, not too much, and garnish with chopped parsley; cold boiled beets, sliced lemon, and anchovies, may be added to the salad, if liked.
A potato salad in the older manner, built from cold boiled potatoes and whatever else the larder offers. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a formula and taste as you go.
- ProportionsNothing is measured here. For four people, figure about 1 1/2 lb potatoes, 2 tablespoons finely chopped onion, and 1/3 to 1/2 cup dressing — the instruction "not too much" is the operative one, since cold potato absorbs dressing and turns pasty if flooded.
- The hinge: dress the potatoes barely warmCold boiled potatoes take up dressing poorly. If you are boiling them for this, slice while still warm enough to handle and dress them then; the seasoning penetrates instead of sitting on the surface. Chill afterward.
- Potato typeUse a waxy variety — red-skinned, fingerling, or Yukon Gold. A floury baking potato will collapse into paste once sliced and turned in dressing.
- "Any good salad dressing"In a book of this period this would most likely mean a boiled dressing (egg, vinegar, butter, thickened over heat) or a plain oil-and-vinegar mixture. Mayonnaise works; a sharp vinaigrette suits the beets and anchovies.
- Blanched almondsAlmonds sold blanched today are already skinned; the older cook had to pour boiling water over them and slip the skins off. "Quartered" probably means cut into four lengthwise pieces rather than chopped.
- Hickory nutsRarely sold commercially, as the shells are hard and the kernels small. Pecans are the closest relative in flavor and can stand in directly.
- Beets and anchoviesAdd sliced cooked beets at the last moment and only to the portion being served, or the whole salad turns pink. Anchovy fillets in oil, minced, are enough seasoning that you should salt the dressing lightly.
- LemonThe recipe lists sliced lemon among the things that "may be added to the salad," though slices are more plausibly laid around the dish than eaten. If you want the acidity through the salad, squeeze it into the dressing instead.
Potato salads dressed with oil, vinegar and onion reach English and American cookbooks by way of German and French practice, where the potato was eaten as a cold dish early on. This version, with its almonds, anchovies and beets, belongs to the late-nineteenth-century fashion for what were sometimes called "composed" or "French" salads — arranged on a platter, garnished, and built from cold cooked leftovers rather than raw greens. The Home Cook Book (a Chicago charity compilation of the 1870s, made up of contributed recipes credited to their donors) is full of such open-ended entries: the cook is assumed to know what a good salad dressing is and to be able to judge quantity by eye. The string of "if liked" clauses is characteristic of the community-cookbook style, where a recipe was a memorandum passed between people who already cooked alike.