IT’S TIME FOR A LITTLE STROLL through the potato salad section of the vast Department of Salad archives down in our basement. But first: Midsummer seems like the perfect time to bring out my ode to the dish, which I originally wrote for the wonderful British Food Almanac. Then we have some of our favorite potato salad recipes. Enjoy them now; it won’t be long until people are talking about nothing but pumpkins and other Cucurbitaceae.
My favourite potato salad is whatever potato salad has landed in front of me at any given time. If I order a sandwich in a restaurant and it automatically comes with some on the side, I’m going to devour it—no questions asked. And when a kind person brings potato salad to a funeral reception I’m attending, I’ll eat as much as I can swallow through my tears and grief.
I once believed that the only potato salad on the planet was the luscious mayonnaise-soaked, pickle-celery-onion-studded marvel I ate growing up in the American South—a lesser version of which you’ll find in diners all over America.
But when I grew up, the scales fell from my eyes.
At an art-student potluck in college, an enormous foil-draped bowl appeared on the picnic table, containing stuffed green olives, tinned smoked oysters and crushed almonds—clearly someone had raided their parents’ cocktail party pantry back home—with slices of steamed new potatoes and spring onions, all dressed in soured cream. It seemed like pure insanity to me. I ate two servings and was sorry when I returned for a third to find the bowl empty.
But do I have plans to recreate that potato salad? No. Mainly because life is short and one must keep moving, ever onwards, in order to experience all the potato salad the world has given us—which is a lot. The potato, domesticated in Peru about 8,000 years ago, is one of a handful of vegetables eaten in practically every culture around the globe, and we dispatch more than 245 kilotons of them a year.
And this means—hallelujah!—potato salad shows up everywhere too. In Japan, it’s a mashed affair with ham, cucumber, and Kewpie mayo (one of my favourites). Huzarensalade, from the Netherlands, is full of pickles, ham, apples and peas. The Polish version, satatka ziemniaczana, includes fresh or pickled vegetables, boiled eggs and smoked meat, bound with soured cream and seasoned with dill. In China, potatoes are shredded, blanched, tossed with herbs and spring onions, and doused with hot chilli oil.
Food historians often point to the German (warm) and French (cold) versions we still eat today as the potato salad originals. But they also imply that these creations were meant to ‘get rid of’ leftover potatoes. Get rid! My god. I choose instead to believe we turn potatoes into salad because we have such tender feelings about the garden’s gentlest, most accommodating vegetable, which has fed and comforted us for centuries. In a pageant of far flashier vegetables, potato salad is the spotlight-grabbing vehicle that allows the potato to sing its soothing song.
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🥬That’s It! We’re done here! We’ll see you soon with a recipe for traditional Idaho spudnuts. I’m kidding—it’s going to be salad.
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