Potato Salad
Potato salad was not an ancient preparation of the Peruvians who tended the indigenous tubers of the Andes slopes. The formula—diced boiled potatoes, an acid, a lipid (oil or a form of diary), seasoning and herbs—was European, either French of German, arising after the general popularization of the potato in mid-and late eighteenth century. In Germany Frederick the Great compelled its general cultivation in a series of potato decrees issued from 1740 to 1764. (The Germans pay back their debt to the Prussian king by leaving potatoes on his grave to this day.) In France King Louis XVI promoted the plant in the decade before he was guillotined (roughly 1782-1793). Perhaps the French pay homage to him by slicing their boiled potatoes when making salad.
1825 seems to have been the year English readers first encountered a recipe for potato salad. French Domestic Cookery, a cooking manual assembled “by an English Physician” offered two formulae for “Pommes de terre en salade”—they are identical except the second adds a quantity of chopped onions. “When boiled and cold, peel, slice, and season them with fine herbs, salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, adding some beet-root and gherkins cut in slices.”
Though this lacks mayonnaise, it is quite recognizable as a form of cold potato salad, though the addition of beet root slices is something of a novelty. But beets were the other root vegetable traditionally made into salads; indeed when Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1855 offered suggestions for winter salads made of boiled vegetables, it observed “potato and beet-root salads are perhaps the best (462).”
While potato salad comes to England from France, the French most likely secured the formula from Germany. Indeed in one of Count von Rumford’s essays on nourishing the poor published in 1799, he observed that “pommes de terre en salade” was “a dish in high repute in some parts of Germany.” He supplied a rudimentary recipe noteworthy for its observation that the dressing used was the same employed for lettuce. Count von Rumsford was an American loyalist and expatriate, Benjamin Thompson, who became famous at the end of the eighteenth century for his work on diet and demographics
Kartoffelsalat appears in German dictionairies of the 1790s, alas without recipes for its creation. There is no association in early print sources of German potato salad with hot dressings, or the mid-nineteenth century contrast with French cold dressed potato salad. Yet the discrimination seems to be standard in American print in the 1860s when potato salad has become for the first time a fixture on menus throughout the United States.
A recipe from Orange County, Virginia, a German settlement area, published on Valentine’s Day of 1868 well captures the hot dressing tradition of Kartoffelsalat:
Potato Salad Native Virginian February 14, 1868
Boil, till done, six Irish potatoes and six white onions, separately; prepare a sauce of two ounces of butter; pepper sauce to suite the taste, and add to it a pint of vinegar; slice a layer of onions and one of potatoes alternately into a deep dish; have the sauce very hot, and pour over them. Very good to any one who likes onions (1).
When we consult the German-inflected cookbooks of the period, for instance William Vollmer’s United States Cook Book of 1857, we don’t find this kind of preparation categorized as a salad; rather it appears under the heading potatoes with sauce, using lemon juice rather than vinegar as the acid. The potatoes were boiled but not cooled before the administration of the hot sauce.
The first cook book to feature a cold potato salad using mayonnaise rather than plain oil and vinegar was Debbie Coleman’s 1855 Cook Book. Coleman was a hostess in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.Here is the formula—the first version of what would become an American classic, albeit with pre-prepared mayo:
Potato Salad
Boil some potatoes and let them get perfectly cool. Slice them very thin. Rub a dish with garlic and put them into it. Make a good dressing of one hard boiled egg and the yolks of two raw eggs, mixed together until smooth. Then add some sweet oil gradually and mix it in until the dressing is very thick. Then thin it with vinegar and add mustard, pepper and salt and parsley cut fine (30).
While the oil and vinegar dressing added to cold potatoes constituted some publicized salads of the 1840s, the question of seasoning was significant. The French presentation had tarragon, chervil, and shallots as components. (See Alexis Soyer, The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846), 69.) The German versions of potato salad began to show a marked preference for new potatoes in the 1880s. The addition of cayenne, dry mustard powder, and onion juice to mayonnaise characterized the salads of some Pennsylvania Germans in the 1870s. The addition of hard boiled eggs as an optional texture also occurs in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Elaborations with pickled beets, anchovies or smoked fish, cream, and capers began appearing in hotel versions during the Gilded Age. Another tendency over the final decades of the century was the transmutation of the processing of the cold boiled potatoes from sliced to diced. Dill supplanted parsley in the early 20th century in some versions. The German habit of serving Kartoffelsalat at tea or late supper was supplanted by its appearance as a lunch or dinner item in the United states. It would become a standard accompaniment of poached or baked salmon.
If one were to read cook books and newspaper recipes exclusively one would never learn of any consumer preference for a particular variety of potato for making salad. Only the seed catalos provide that insight. There we learn that the Kidney Potato was the first choice when salad first came to the United States. B. K. Bliss’s 1870 catalog in particular identified the English Lapstone Kidney as the best salad variety. The American preference was for the Mercer Potato, with the early Rose also having adherents.
South Carolinians first embraced potato salad in the decade after the Civil War, when truck farmers on the Charleston neck began growing vast quantitates of early rose potatoes for the New York markets. The first recipe to appear in a cookbook presents a kind of potato salad that enjoyed a very brief vogue in the late nineteenth century but has not come down in Carolina cookery to the 21st century: a mashed potato salad.
Potato Salad Theresa C. Brown, Modern Domestic Cooking 1871
Steam the potatoes mealy, mash them smooth with two spoonsful of butter; stir in a cupful of cream, a tablespoon of ground black pepper, one of made-mustard, two of chopped onion, previously boiled, a proper seasoning of salt; incorporate these ingredients thoroughly. Then stir in a teacupful of best vinegar—lastly, stir in lightly six eggs, boiled hard and chopped fine. Turn into your salad-dish. Garnish with cold red beets cut into fancy shapes. Keep the potatoes warm while mixing (94).
The last appearance of mashed potato salad takes place in the 1901 Southern Cook Book, published in conjunction with the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition in Charleston. This latter version incorporates mustard.
Nearly every other mention of potato salad in print after 1870 referred to the slice hot German potato salad, or the diced cold potato salad with French dressing or mayonnaise. It first appears in restaurant advertisements in 1874 when Seeger’s in Columbia lists it among lunch offerings on September 26. [Columbia Daily Phoenix, September 26, 1874, 3.] In October 1876 it potato salad is listed among the food entries in the Anderson Farmer’s and Mechanics Association Fair. [Anderson Intelligencer (July 6, 1876), 6. The first recipe to appear in a S. C. newspaper in the Fairfield News and Herald on December 14, 1881. As might be expected from a paper in the Dutch Fork section of Carolina, the recipe was for German potato salad, had the typical sliced, not diced, treatment of boiled potatoes, and added a teaspoon of sugar in the vinegar and olive oil. A non-German and non-hot recipe was published in 1886. One looks in vain for novelties in the formulae for Carolina salads—the bacon bits, the teaspoon of curry powder, the onion juice, and the hard boiled eggs are standard across the United States. Abbeville was the center of potato salad innovation, pioneering in 1889 the use of celery seed, and mustard rather than mayonnaise or French dressing in the salad. By the 1890s potato salad was everywhere: at the ladies’ tea table, on the banquet menu, in the picnic basket. In 1907 cafés were advertising “Old Fashioned Potato Salad” an oddly nostalgic cue for a dish entirely lacking in antiquarian features.
The 1920 brought food modernism to potato salad with the brief experiment with jellied potato salad, and the incorporation of diced ham into the salad. Hot potato salad vied with cold for favor, both styles inspiring many devotees. Some households rotated both styles through the calendar—hot salads in cold months; cold salads in hot months.
Now in 2020 potato salad is the a necessary side at the barbecue restaurant, on the Church buffet, at the tail gate, and the summer picnic. Purists use Duke’s mayonnaise in their salads, but folks with a sweet tooth use Miracle Whip. There is little ground for agreement between these two camps.
Sources: Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, “Salade de pommes de terre“ Essais politiques, economiques et philosophiques 2 Vols (Geneva: G. J. Manget, 1799), 2:298. “By an English Physician,” French Domestic Cookery (London, 1825), 245-46. [Root Vegetable Salads], Godey’s Lady’s Book (May 1855), 462. Debby B. Coleman, “Potato Salad,” Cook Book ([Philadelphia]: By the Author, 1855), 30. Alexis Soyer, The Gastronomic Regenerator (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1846), 69. [Pennsylvania Dutch Potato Salad], Wilkes-Barre Leader (October 31, 1878), 1. “Potato Salad-German Style,” Fairfield News and Herald (December 14, 1881), 5. “Potato Salad,” Abbeville Press and Banner (April 4, 1889), 8. “For Potato Salad,” Abbeville Press and Banner (September 25, 1889), 4. “Potato Salad,” Daily Inter Ocean Chicago (February 1, 1891), 23.