Not long ago, I found myself diving into cooking potato salad. I would like to know why this happened. The idea was with me, and I was trying, if not to get it out, then at least to apply the research pressure.
So I turned to Bonnie Slotnick, who owns a shop in the East Village of Manhattan that specializes in rare and vintage cookbooks, and started reading every potato salad recipe she could find.
What we found took us from the late 19th century to four potato salad recipes in “The Settlement Cook Book,” from 1943, and the delightful wanderings of Clementine Paddleford's 1960 compilation “How America Eats.” I read Mimi Sheraton's “German Cookbook” from 1965, with its instructions for one hot and one cold potato salad. I saw the depth of emotion in “Princess Pamela's Soul Food Cookbook,” from 1969, and marveled at the exquisite pottery of “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine,” the 1978 book by sisters Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden-Lloyd. Everything is old.
Really, I wanted confirmation. Could what I was hearing be true? Because what I was hearing sounded absurd, and it was this: Potato salad is the Great American Dream Dish.
In any year, potato salad is what you take out or bring to gatherings between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But now, as this country turns 250 years old, I think that Yukon's vat of mayonnaiseized (or oiled) gold has a much greater significance, as America's food is the most important element that we have, that we have. always it was necessary.
Credit…Cannonball with Wesley Morris
I can hear you: How about a hot dog? The hot dog is “America.” I recently read a love letter to the Costco hot dog that gave me pause for a moment about the singular glory of potato salad. But when was the last time you made a hot dog from scratch and brought it to the grill?
I believe that Potato salad is the biggest thing you can give an American spread. Not because it's the tastiest or prettiest, although you never put it aside. I believe this, in part, because anyone can do something else and deliver. It's just potatoes and a bunch of other stuff.
When a new person comes to this country, they learn – somehow! – that this is the dish you bring to the gathering. It's a dish that shows a desire to understand the place, and they seem to have heard that this dish with buttered lumps is the way to go. Depending on who you hear from and where you're from, you may feel free to add cured pork, a spoonful of gochujang or a jar of capers.
That is your contribution to the problem of this meal, your contribution of your culture to ours, of yourself to the promise of this place. This is an offering that can say both “you are welcome” and “we are here.”
Every culture in America seems to have some expression of potato salad. Jewish food. Japanese. German. Calabrian. Nepali. Bodega. My dear friend is Peruvian and knows since potatoes. He told me that in Peru it is better ensalada rusa, and in Spain, ensaladilla rusa: potatoes, carrots, peas and sometimes cubed beet with mayonnaise. Someone bring beet rusa to this Texas barbecue!
Potato salad is not a meal. It is the accompaniment, the support of everything else around it. It covers the plate and lowers the palate. It fills fried and cools hot. It is reliable. It is expected.
It can also be slow. Take advantage. Rename. No matter what, we eaters hold the truth of your dish to reveal itself.
It's true, too, that potato salad can be polarizing. The choice of mayonnaise alone can start a fight. Please, strike your miracle somewhere else. If no one brings potato salad, an existential violation has occurred: No one would care enough to bring it?
But again: Who has what it takes to try, to meet the moment? Potato salad is a Thanksgiving turkey for summer parties. No one will forget that wasted time. (On the contrary, we'll all be happy whenever you set foot on it.) I love potato salad with this. If getting our founding documents in order was a test, consider the constitutional convention of explaining potato salad. It's the most divisive dish we have and admit we wouldn't feel complete without it. True soul food.
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Who knows when I become a potato salad person? Maybe a moment in my family – my mother, born Judith Lavern Smith – found out that I can carry a knife and live on onions. I will say I was 11.
Mom's potato salad was onion-y enough to bite you back. For the sous-chef, this meant getting a softball as close to the slurry as your sins will admit. I would cut an onion, chop it, bring it in for testing, fail, then go ahead and chop it until I passed. This can take half an hour. Mom needed less than five minutes. But if she made potato salad, it usually meant she was making something else, too. again one thing and then another. So even the little helper was helpful.
Credit…Armando Rafael of the New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
By the time I was 14, I had graduated to extra work: chopping celery, scrambling a dozen eggs at times, peeling and dicing potatoes, dripping mustard, squeezing the sweet to get every drop of syrup out of it, scooping out Hellmanns and whipping them into everything else.
When it was time for the paprika, salt, pepper and sugar that my mother accidentally used, she took over. It is very good to trust a child with a hidden knife. To raise children badly is to entrust someone with the spice.
Everyone loved mom's potato salad. They can taste love (and, if I may say, work). It was actually a recipe that her grandmother used, and now it's the potato salad that I make. Every bite contains every ingredient. So what you taste is the creaminess and the crunch, the sweetness and – because I'm a seasoned person now – the heat of the paprika. This is a clear, lively dish, resulting from the combination of texture and flavor and color. I never once looked at that harmony as more than what my mother learned from her grandmother, a family thing.
It wasn't until I started reading Bonnie Slotnick's cookbooks and sitting with the recipes Bonnie tirelessly served me that I saw the story develop. In book after book written by Black writers, or books that might be called Black writers (because, let's say, a white woman published what she swore were her cook's recipes), it became clear that the potato salad of my people was almost My People's: mustard and variations of mayonnaise, egg and onion, sometimes celery and cucumber.
There was never a recorded recipe in my family. Like music and storytelling, food was a ritual, a result of slavery, an institution that denied literacy to enslaved people for fear of what a slave could accomplish. We did so. We make potato salad. What I found at Bonnie's was history. What I got was an inheritance.
But! Another thing to understand about this dish is that unlike, say, macaroni and cheese, potato salad is not a product of slavery. Black Americans have a claim on it, but no one else.
The national agreement that made individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness, justice and equal protection, can feel false, impossible, impossible. Not when it comes to potato salad. Potato salad is an agreement with the world – this wet dining of harmonic convergence, achieved only with thought and patience and a kind of violence (So. More. Carving), but also some fealty at our core, the values of clay.
This is a dish that modern Americans have been giving away for most of the past 250 years. It is a dish that keeps insisting that it belongs to them.
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