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Potato Salad
Place six sound potatoes in a saucepan, cover with plenty cold water, add a tablespoon salt and cook forty minutes, drain, let cool off, then peel, slice rather finely, and place in a salad bowl. Cut a small white onion in half, then slice it very fine and add the potatoes with a teaspoon finely chopped parsley, season with four tablespoons dressing, mix well and serve.
A plain boiled-potato salad of the sort that appears in nearly every general cookbook of the period. Two things decide whether it is good: the potato you choose and the moment you dress it.
- Dress them warmThe recipe says to cool the potatoes fully before peeling, which is fine for handling, but warm slices absorb dressing and cold ones do not. Peel and slice while still hot enough to be awkward, then dress immediately and let the salad come to room temperature.
- Which potato"Sound potatoes" means unblemished and unsprouted, not a variety. Use a waxy or all-purpose potato — Yukon Gold, red-skinned, fingerling — because a floury baking potato will crumble at the slicing stage.
- Forty minutesThat timing assumes large whole potatoes boiled in their skins. Medium potatoes are done in 20 to 30 minutes; test with a knife tip at the centre rather than watching the clock, and start them in cold water so they cook evenly.
- The saltA tablespoon of salt in a saucepan of water is right — potatoes boiled in the skin take up very little of it, and unsalted potato is the usual fault in this dish.
- "Four tablespoons dressing"The recipe assumes a dressing given elsewhere in the book; the quantity and type are not specified here. A simple oil-and-vinegar dressing is the likeliest reading. Four tablespoons is modest for six potatoes; expect to use half again as much, and add a spoonful of the hot potato water if it seems dry.
- The onionRaw white onion sliced very fine is assertive on the first day and harsh on the second. Soaking the slices in cold water for ten minutes and draining them takes the edge off without losing the bite.
- Season at the endNo pepper is specified. Taste after mixing and correct with black pepper, salt and a little more vinegar — potato flattens acid and needs more than seems reasonable.
- YieldSix potatoes give six to eight side servings. It keeps a day refrigerated but should be brought back to room temperature before serving; cold dulls both the oil and the onion.
Potato salad in this form — boiled potatoes, onion, parsley, oil and vinegar, no mayonnaise — is generally the older and more widely distributed version, long familiar across Germany, Austria and France before the creamy American style took hold. A dressed potato salad of this kind was in no sense exotic by 1900. The instruction to boil the potatoes whole and unpeeled is the practical heart of the method and long predates the recipe: skin-on cooking keeps the flesh from waterlogging, which is why the technique survives unchanged.