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Potato Salad (Preparing a potato salad it)
In preparing a potato salad it is much more digestible if a portion of the dressing is poured over the potatoes while hot. Sufficient mayonnaise may be prepared at one time to last for several days, keeping it in a cold place. Dilute a portion of this mayonnaise with an equal quantity of tarragon or plain vinegar, and for each half cupful add one tablespoonful of onion juice. Dice the potatoes before cooking, and as soon as drained pour over them a part of this dressing, turning them through several times, so that they may absorb it evenly. When cold, add the remainder of the dressing and as much cut celery as you have of potatoes. The celery may be omitted and chopped onion added, one quarter as much onion as potato and no onion juice.
This is less a fixed formula than a method, and the method is sound: the hinge is dressing the potatoes while they are still hot so they drink it in. Everything else is proportion.
- Dress hot, then again coldWarm potatoes absorb vinegar and oil; cold ones only get coated. Turn them through part of the thinned dressing the moment they are drained, then add the remainder once they are cool. The claim about digestibility is period reasoning, but the texture argument holds.
- Dicing before cookingCut potatoes cook fast and drain dry, which is what makes the hot dressing work. Use a waxy or all-purpose potato and start it in salted water; cubes of about half an inch will be tender in 8 to 12 minutes and will fall apart if pushed further.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the coarse side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or pulse and strain it. One tablespoon per half cup of thinned mayonnaise is assertive; a small onion yields roughly that much.
- Tarragon vinegarStill easy to find, or made by steeping fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. The recipe's own alternative is just 'plain vinegar'.
- The mayonnaiseNo formula is given because the book assumes you have one standing. Homemade mayonnaise is raw egg: keep it refrigerated, use pasteurized eggs if you are serving anyone vulnerable, and do not follow the original's "several days in a cold place" as written, since a period cold larder or icebox and a modern refrigerator are not describing the same temperature. Good commercial mayonnaise thinned with vinegar does exactly the same job here.
- ProportionsEqual volumes of diced potato and cut celery, or in the celery-free version one part chopped onion to four parts potato. Two pounds of potatoes with celery to match makes a bowl for six to eight as a side.
- Serving temperaturePotato salad left standing in warm weather is the classic vehicle for foodborne illness; keep it cold until it goes on the table.
Potato salad is generally traced to German and Austrian kitchens, where warm potatoes tossed with vinegar and onion had long been standard, and the instruction here to dress the potatoes hot is often said to survive from that older habit even though the dressing has become mayonnaise. What dates the page is the assumption that a cook keeps a jar of homemade mayonnaise on hand and thins it as needed: commercial jarred mayonnaise appears to have become a household default in the United States only after the First World War, so turn-of-the-century books treat the emulsion as a base sauce to be made in quantity and varied, much as one would treat a stock. The celery is equally of its moment, since cultivated blanched celery was a fashionable and comparatively expensive vegetable and appears in salads of the period, with the chopped-onion version offered as the plainer alternative.