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Potato Salad Without Onion
Dice while still warm four good sized boiled potatoes, and mix with them four anchovies cut in small bits; mash smooth one mealy potato, and add gradually sufficient olive oil to make the consistence of thick cream; add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and pour over the salad. Garnish with slices of hard boiled egg, pickles and parsley. A potato salad wholly destitute of the flavor of the onion is apt to be rather insipid. To one who desires merely to get rid of the flesh of the onion the pressed juice may be acceptable, and in such case it is best added to the dressing, the proper proportion being from one-half to one teaspoonful of onion juice to the usual amount of dressing.
A warm potato salad bound with a potato-thickened oil dressing rather than mayonnaise. It is straightforward, but the proportions are left largely to judgment and the anchovies carry all the salt.
- Quantities and yieldFour good-sized boiled potatoes is roughly 1.5 lb, plus one more for the binder. It serves four as a side.
- The hinge: dress the potatoes warmWarm potato absorbs oil and vinegar; cold potato sheds them. Dice and dress as soon as the potatoes can be handled, and let the salad come to room temperature before serving.
- The mashed-potato dressingThis is an emulsion in the same family as skordalia — starch, not egg, holds the oil. Mash the single potato while hot and completely lump-free, then trickle the oil in slowly while beating, as with mayonnaise. Reckon on 1/3 to 1/2 cup of oil for cream consistency; if it stiffens, loosen with a spoonful of the potato cooking water.
- AnchoviesThe four anchovies here are most likely whole salt-packed fish, each of which would yield two fillets, so probably more fish than four modern tinned fillets. Taste before adding any salt at all; with oil-packed fillets you may want six, rinsed and patted dry.
- Boiling the potatoesBoil in their skins and peel while hot, so they do not waterlog. A waxy variety holds its dice; the one potato reserved for the dressing is better floury, as the text's "mealy" indicates.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons against a third of a cup of oil is a sharp dressing by modern habit. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it; add half, taste, then finish.
- Onion juiceThe half to one teaspoonful noted at the end is grated onion pressed through a sieve or squeezed in cloth. It gives the flavor without the texture, which is the whole point of the note.
Potato salad is generally traced to German cookery, where warm potatoes dressed with oil, vinegar and often bacon fat were long established, and some nineteenth-century American books label the dish "German salad." The anchovy here is the older European touch: before bottled Worcestershire and commercial mayonnaise were widely available, salted fish was one of the ways to give a bland vegetable savor. The closing paragraph is characteristic of turn-of-the-century domestic writing, which took onion breath seriously as a social matter, and grated, strained onion juice was often said to be the acceptable compromise.