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For Salad (Cupfuls sliced cold potatoes)
3 cupfuls sliced cold potatoes 5 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 teaspoonful mustard 1 cupful broken hickory nut 1 teaspoonful salt meats 2 teaspoonfuls sugar 1 teaspoonful chopped onion 2 yolks of eggs Chopped parsley 3/4 cupful cream or milk Cold cooked sliced beets 1/4 cupful vinegar Sliced lemon Lettuce leaves For dressing. Mix sugar, salt, and mustard, add Crisco and stir thoroughly; then add yolks of eggs well beaten, cream, and lastly vinegar. Cook in double boiler until consistency of cream. If milk is used instead of cream, add 1 teaspoonful flour to other dry ingredients. For salad. Mix potatoes, nuts, and onion together, and place on crisp lettuce leaves; pour over dressing and garnish to taste with beets, lemon, and parsley.
Salads
The ingredient list came off the page in two columns and has interleaved: read it as a dressing (Crisco, mustard, salt, sugar, egg yolks, cream or milk, vinegar) and a salad (potatoes, hickory nut meats, onion, parsley, beets, lemon, lettuce). "1 cupful broken hickory nut meats" is one line split across columns.
- The hinge: cook the dressing gentlyThis is a boiled dressing thickened by egg yolk, not an emulsified mayonnaise. Hold the double boiler water below a simmer and stir constantly until it coats a spoon, around 170F; a hard boil will scramble the yolks into grains that no amount of whisking will smooth.
- Melted Crisco behaves differently from oilCrisco is a solid hydrogenated shortening. Whisked into a dressing that is then chilled, it sets into small firm flecks and the dressing turns pasty. If you want the period result, serve the dressing barely warm over the potatoes; if you want a dressing that stays creamy cold, use a neutral vegetable oil in the same quantity.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is a wild-gathered nut that was still common in American kitchens in 1913 and is now almost impossible to buy. Pecans are the same genus and the closest substitute; toasted walnuts also work, with a sharper edge.
- PotatoesUse waxy potatoes — red-skinned or new potatoes — boiled in their skins, cooled, then peeled and sliced. Russets slice into rubble in a dressed salad.
- The flour noteThe extra teaspoonful of flour when using milk compensates for the missing butterfat. Sift or whisk it into the dry ingredients before the fat goes in, or it will lump in the finished dressing.
- Vinegar last, for a reasonThe quarter cup of vinegar goes in after the yolks and dairy, which plausibly limits curdling on contact with acid, though the recipe gives no reason. Follow the order as written.
- Onion and saltA teaspoonful of chopped onion for three cupfuls of potato is restrained by current tastes; scallion or a little grated shallot gives more presence. Salt the potatoes while still warm as well — the dressing alone will not season them through.
- YieldServes four to six as a side salad. The dressing makes a generous cupful and keeps three or four days refrigerated.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to explain a product no cook had any use for yet: Crisco, launched in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a substitute for both lard and butter. The book's method is to press the new fat into every existing category of cookery, which is why it turns up here whisked into a boiled salad dressing where a nineteenth-century cook would have used melted butter or salad oil. Boiled dressings themselves were common in American cookery well before mayonnaise took hold — cheaper in eggs, more stable in a warm pantry, and forgiving of the tart, sugared balance that a potato salad wanted. The hickory nuts are the older, more local note in the recipe: gathered rather than bought, and familiar in Midwestern kitchens of the period in a way they have not been since.