Potato salad

"Potato salads create the kind of situation where your largest bowl is taken down from the top shelf and filled to capacity with your potato salad of choice and then lugged to an event to feed 25 people or more. It's supposed to be a crowd pleaser, but it only works if the crowd consists of a single family and it's their potato salad that's being served." Dana Velden - Kitchn

And that's exactly why I'm writing about potato salad and to prove it here is my big bowl shortly to be taken off to a party for 30 people - a work reunion for David. I was asked to bring a salad and I'm not that great at most of them, but I think I do a fair potato one. So they'd better not have their own preferred versions.

Here it is close-up. It's a fairly traditional potato salad - potatoes, bacon, boiled eggs, onions and parsley with a standard vinaigrette dressing. I'm not at all sure where I learnt this recipe. I suspect that it just evolved.

I used to have a cookery book called Leftover for Tomorrow which I used a lot when I was a new wife but I think I threw it out in one of my cullings. I've always regretted that, not so much for the recipes, but for the nostalgia. I now have Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Leftovers which is probably a lot better and I do I love it, but I learnt a lot from that old unillustrated paperback. So originally I think I made potato salad with leftover potatoes which actually, I now think, need a different approach. Because the potatoes are cold and therefore do not absorb a dressing like warm ones do. So probably best to go for a mayonnaise or similar kind of dressing when dealing with cold ones. I must admit that for today's salad I did throw in three leftover potatoes, but they will have been lost in the overall thing. I peeled them too, which I didn't do with the hot ones, although I do usually.

Like a few other 'standard' dishes there seem to be a few basic arguments. All of which Felicity Cloake addresses in her How to make perfect potato salad article. Plus the usual discussion on what potatoes to use. Ideally they almost all agree on English new potatoes - Jersey Royals to be very specific - but alas we don't seem to get them here. They have an exquisite taste, probably best approximated by kipflers or dutch creams. Mostly all the chefs and cooks say waxy potatoes, but there are a few adherents to mushier ones - those that collapse too much on the outside when you are cooking them. And it's quite a trick to get the potatoes to just the right consistency. One guy suggested adding vinegar to the water - which I tried, but I don't know that it made much difference. This batch weren't too bad, so maybe the vinegar did help - just a bit mushy on the outside but done in the middle. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall rather endearingly suggests a solution to overdone potatoes:

"If you do happen to slightly overcook the spuds, don't despair, just stir them vigorously with the sorrel and butter so they break up a little and get a bit 'mushy'. Pretend it was quite deliberate - your 'bashed' new potatoes will still be delicious."

'Crushed' is another word you could use and indeed I saw recipes here and there for crushed potato salads. Actually I reckon it's almost impossible not to crush them if you are mixing them with something else, unless they are small and left whole - which you could probably do with the aforesaid English new potatoes. Well Jersey to be precise I think.

His recipe, by the way is very simple. The dressing is just butter and oil with shredded sorrel - added whilst the potatoes are still hot, left to wilt and then tossed again with pepper and salt. You almost wonder whether you can really call it a salad. I mean it's hot, not even warm, so really it's a side dish to my mind. Not to self - define salad one day. You can grow sorrel very easily. Even I can.

The other controversies about the potatoes themselves apart from the type and whether they should be 'crushed' or not are whether to peel them. For today's batch I didn't though I mostly do, in spite of ending up with slightly burnt fingers - for you need to do it when the potatoes are hot. The argument for peeling is that the dressing is absorbed better, but if you are cutting up the potatoes you will have non-peel sides through which to absorb anyway and also some of the peel comes off when you're cutting them up as well. One guy did a really interesting experiment. For one batch he boiled the potatoes in some water with green colouring. In another he added the green colouring when the potatoes were hot. In the last he added it when the potatoes were cold. Left them for a while and cut them open. Hey presto - hardly any absorption of the green in the cold potatoes, and most with the hot ones. Somewhere in between when added to the cold water they cooked in. Interesting and it seems to prove the point of the people who advocate adding the dressing when the potatoes are warm.

Which is what I began to do somewhere along the line of my potato salad evolution. Which is also the reason I generally peel the potatoes, because it seems quite obvious to me that the dressing will be absorbed better through warm skinless potatoes. But today I was feeling lazy. You prepare all your additions first - onions, bacon, parsley, eggs in my case and put them in a bowl. Mix your dressing in a jar. Chop your hot potatoes and add them in batches to the bowl. Pour over some dressing and mix. Repeat with the rest of the potatoes in batches.

Then there's the dressing. What kind of dressing? A little bit of history here.

Obviously there were no potato salads in Europe before the conquistadores. It's hard to imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes and maybe even harder to imagine northern European cooking without the potato. And try as I might I could not find whether the South Americans had an ancient version of potato salad. I just found an Argentinian salad which is actually a Russian version, so brought back to South America in later times.

It is commonly thought that potato salad as we know it today, originated in Germany where it was dressed with vinegar and stock and mixed with bacon and onions. No oil, but sometimes mustard. Often the potatoes seem to be sliced rather than left whole or cut into chunks as well.

"As a country with lots of potatoes and lots of recipes for potatoes, Germany almost certainly was among the first to look at cooked small new potatoes or cut chunks of larger spuds and imagine them blanketed with dressing. The dressing they came up with was a classic. Kin to the heated dressing used to wilt spinach salad, this one thrilled German taste buds, raised as they were on sauerkraut and sauerbraten with vinegar bite. Some versions featured a little coarse mustard, others cut the sour with a little sugar, and most added bacon and even its flavorful drippings." John Demers - Houston Chronicle

This spread throughout Europe where it was varied according to the culinary traditions of the country involved - the French, of course, used a vinaigrette. Then the nineteenth century emigrants to the USA took it back to the Americas, where someone hit on the idea of dressing the potatoes with mayonnaise. If you look at all the American recipes they almost invariably use mayonnaise. Personally I do not like this nearly so much and I really do think that with mayonnaise you need to add it when the potatoes are cold. For my taste it's much too gluggy and sickly.

One author described it as mayonnaise with a bit of potato on the side. And the mayonnaise is usually white and out of a bottle rather than beautiful golden homemade mayonnaise. Unfortunately if you are buying potato salad from the deli in the supermarket this is usually the kind you get. I really don't like it.

These days chefs are getting a bit more adventurous with their dressings, with pesto of all kinds being a favourite, or yoghurt and other mayonnaise substitutes like sour cream and crème fraīche. Below are two examples - Donna Hay on the left with a coriander pesto and Yotam Ottolenghi on the right with yoghurt and horseradish. And incidentally the latter goes for the 'crushed' potato option.

donna hay

ottolenghi

And Heston Blumenthal, ever the experimenter adds gravy to his version. Well it's a recipe for Waitrose and uses a packaged gravy by Heston. One of the supermarkets here, can't remember which one, has some Heston products so you might be able to find it here.

The final big controversy is onions. To add or not to add, the other options being spring onions, shallots or chives, some of which I have used and which are certainly OK but I admit I generally use onions. Jane Grigson thinks they are a must. Felicity Cloake thinks they are too much. Depends on whether you like raw onions I guess, though their flavour somehow lifts the whole thing.

"a potato salad should not be a ladylike dish. It should have a direct appeal, from the delicate earthiness that characterises good potatoes and the sweet fire of a good onion." Jane Grigson

I suppose you could experiment and add some cooked, even caramelised onions. And speaking of experimentation Jamie Oliver has fourteen recipes for a potato salad, including a salade niçoise which is a bit different and a whole other world of controversy.

His most experimental version is Bombay potato salad, which I have to say sounds pretty yummy. Looks it too. The dressing is lemon juice and oil, and the potatoes are 'crushed' but the skins are left on. And yes there are some onions.

He also adds some peas, which are one of the more common additions that you will find elsewhere. Others are various smoked or pickled fish - a Scandinavian version, that I perhaps should have included, although it's more of a meal in itself than a side dish, any herb you might like to mention, also greens such as spinach, celery, cucumber, and somewhat rarely - tomato. Nigel Slater has a tomato version:

Really rather different. No onions, but breadcrumbs and anchovies. Almost a salade niçoise I suppose.

So go for it. Experiment but my suggestion is that if you insist on mayonnaise don't add too much and don't use one that's too creamy.

POSTSCRIPT: I have a fair amount of leftovers and I'm going to take my husband's possibly brilliant suggestion and use them in an omelette. Just fry them up and add the eggs. Should be easy and possibly very tasty. He's making his home-made bread too today. A perfect accompaniment with green salad for the health. It's a rainy, cold day. Perfect.