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Potato Salad
2 cups freshly boiled potatoes. 1 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. teaspoon pepper Few drops onion juice 1 tablespoon finelyminced parsley About 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon vinegar Cut potatoes in-inch cubes. Add seasoning, then olive oil, only what the potatoes will absorb, then add vinegar and mix carefully until it the potatoes will absorb, then add vinegar and mix carefully until it is absorbed.
Mound on a bed of lettuce in a shallow dish. Egg yolks make an attractive garnish if put through a ricer. Tomatoes cut in eighths added to potato salad make a pleasant variation.
The text has come through with its ingredient list truncated — the quantity of potatoes and the salt measurement are missing — but the method is intact and it is a sound one: a warm French-dressed potato salad rather than a mayonnaise-bound one.
- The missing quantitiesThe listed seasonings and roughly 3 tablespoons oil to 1 tablespoon vinegar would suit a modest quantity of boiled potatoes, but the weight has dropped out of the text and cannot be recovered from what remains. The salt line is likewise missing; season to taste, starting with about a teaspoon.
- Dress them warmThe recipe does not say so, but potatoes absorb oil and vinegar far better while still warm from boiling; once cold and set, the dressing tends to sit on the surface. Cube them as soon as they can be handled.
- "Only what the potatoes will absorb"Add the oil in stages and stop when the cubes stop drinking it. Waxy potatoes take less than floury ones, which may be why the figure is given as "about" rather than fixed.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: onion grated on a fine grater or crushed and the liquid pressed out, giving flavour without visible pieces. A teaspoon or so of very finely grated onion does the same job.
- Egg yolks through a ricerHard-boiled yolks, pushed through a ricer or fine sieve, produce the fine yellow crumb sometimes called mimosa garnish. Cook the eggs 10 minutes, cool them in cold water, and rice the yolks just before serving so they stay loose.
- VinegarThe recipe does not specify a type; cider or white wine vinegar suits it. Taste before adding the full tablespoon.
- Potato choiceA waxy variety -- new potatoes, Yukon Gold, red-skinned -- holds a cube; the recipe's fraction has dropped out of the text. Russets will collapse as you fold in the dressing.
Potato salad dressed with oil and vinegar rather than mayonnaise is the older of the two forms, and one that American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often meant when they wrote the words without qualification; the style is generally traced to German and Austrian practice, where warm potatoes are turned in vinegar and fat. The instruction to mound the salad on lettuce in a shallow dish and finish it with riced egg yolk belongs to the same period's insistence that even a plain salad be composed and presented, not merely spooned out.