Home › Salads › Potato Salad (Scrub and boil ten medium)
Potato Salad (Scrub and boil ten medium)
Scrub and boil ten medium sized potatoes, skin them and cut in half inch dice; into the yolks of two raw eggs work slowly one-half of a cupful of olive oil; when thick and smooth, add one teaspoonful of salt, one-third of a teaspoonful of white pepper, one-half of a cupful of vinegar, and two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped onion. Put the hot potatoes in layers in a salad bowl, with a portion of the dressing between each layer, and over the top pour onehalf of a cupful of boiling water; cover and set aside for two hours, garnish with cress or such greens as may be procurable.
This is a hand-made mayonnaise poured over potatoes that are still hot, which is the whole point of the method — the starch drinks the dressing instead of sitting under it.
- Dress them hotPeel and dice the potatoes the moment they are cool enough to handle, and layer them while still steaming. Cold potatoes seal and the dressing slides off; hot ones absorb the vinegar and oil right through.
- The emulsionTwo raw yolks will carry half a cup of oil easily, but only if the oil goes in drop by drop at the start. A bowl and whisk, or a small food processor with the oil trickled through the feed tube, both work. If it splits, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it slowly.
- Half a cup of vinegarThat is a great deal by modern taste and it thins the mayonnaise to a pourable dressing rather than a stiff one, which is intended here. Cider or white wine vinegar suits; begin with a quarter cup, taste, and add the rest only if you want the sharpness the original clearly wanted.
- The boiling waterNot an error; the recipe plainly calls for it. It appears to be there to loosen the dressing so it runs down between the layers as the salad stands. Use it, and use it boiling.
- Two hours coveredThis is the marinating stage, not a chilling stage. Leave it at room temperature no longer than two hours as written, then refrigerate anything not eaten. An egg-yolk dressing left standing warm for an afternoon is not worth the risk; if you are serving the very young, the elderly or anyone pregnant, use pasteurized shell eggs for the yolks.
- White pepperUsually chosen so the dressing stays pale. Black pepper tastes much the same here but speckles it; either is fine.
- YieldTen medium potatoes is somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2 lb and will serve about eight as a side dish.
- Garnish"Cress or such greens as may be procurable" leaves it open; cress of the period may be watercress or garden cress. Peppery leaves -- watercress, arugula, young mustard -- do more for the dish than lettuce.
Warm potato salad dressed with vinegar and onion belongs to the German and Austrian tradition, and American cookbooks of the period often print more than one kind: a vinegar-dressed sort, closer to a Kartoffelsalat, and a cold mayonnaise sort. This version sits between them, using a true made mayonnaise but thinning it and pouring it over hot potatoes in the older manner. The instruction to garnish with "such greens as may be procurable" is a reminder that a salad of this date depended on what the market had that week, and cress appears as a garnish throughout books of this period.