Potato Salad: Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge #6

For background on the Historical Food Fortnightly, click here.

The Challenge: Seasonal Fruits/Vegetables August 10 - August 23
Concoct a dish based on the fruits and/or vegetables that would have been in season and available to the particular time you wish to interpret. It needn’t be the place you are in at this moment, but it should coincide with the season!

The Recipe: Potato Salad (recipe 1154), The Book of Household Management, Mrs. Isabella Mary Beeton, [1861].

Mrs. Beeton's Potato Salad (in a manner of speaking)

Ahh...I started back to work part-time for my employer and that means a new schedule for all of us.  I actually started this a week before the end of the challenge (with making tarragon vinegar) but didn't finish until the bitter end and the write up was even more delayed.  But I did make the challenge recipe!  I pulled from my free download on my Kindle (I do have the print copy back home in Minnesota, too....but that didn't make the packing cut when we had 2 checked bags each at 50 pounds to get us through almost 2 years).

Recipe:
Ingredients- 10 or 12 cold boiled potatoes, 4 tablespoonfuls of tarragon or plain vinegar, 6 tablespoonfuls of salad-oil, pepper and salt to taste, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley.

Mode- Cut the potatoes into slices about 1/2 inch in thickness; put these into a salad-bowl with oil and vinegar in the above proportion; season with pepper, salt, and a teaspoonful of minced parsley; stir the salad well, that all the ingredients may be thoroughly incorporated, and it is ready to serve.  This should be made two or three hours before it is wanted for table.  Anchovied, olives, or pickles may be added to this salad, as also slices of cold beef, fowl, or turkey.

Seasonable at any time.  [There you have it.  Mrs. Beeton said it's seasonable whenever I want to make it.]

How Did You Make It:  Peru is the potato capital of the world, there are tons of potato varieties grown here.  They have purple potatoes (purple all the way through), large baking potatoes, red skinned potatoes, and these white potatoes with red dots that I chose just because they looked fun and there is no way I can get exactly the kind of North American potatoes I'm used to using.  So, my fusion cooking of American frontier and Peruvian cooking continues.  I boiled the potatoes on the stove (after googling how to do it, I admit....learning that I'm supposed to put the potatoes in the water when cold and allow them to warm and NOT cover them up lest it make them mushy....I ended up cooking them for about 45 minutes but I'm sure that is because of our altitude.  We're way higher than Denver.  Then I sliced the potatoes a couple of days later, poured the tarragon vinegar over the top (I used up some of my dried tarragon in regular white vinegar), added salt and pepper just by dumping, and used pulverized parsley (I thought we had dried parsley but nope) and soy oil (thought we had olive oil but when I went to put this together late at night I found my husband had used the last of it).  Olive oil costs over $10 a liter here, so we don't buy it all the time.

Time to Complete:  About 1 hour, including 45 minutes to cook the potatoes.

Total Cost: Approximately $1.25 USD.  Potatoes: about one pound for 2.5 soles (about 90 cents USD), oil, vinegar, and spices negligible and from pantry.

How Successful Was It?:  My 2 year old spit it out, but I'm sure that was the bitter vinegar taste.  I think I would have preferred the salad with olive oil instead of soybean oil.  I think this iteration was just ok but I would be willing to try again with fresh parsley and olive oil.

How Accurate Is It?:  Not as accurate as some of my other offerings.  We had a marvelous discussion on the Historical Food Fortnightly Facebook page about salad oil and what that means...and in the end all I had available to me in the house was soybean oil.  The potatoes are clearly what you can buy here in Peru, the parsley I thought we had turned out to be pulverized dust instead of parsley leaves and I'm trying not to purchase more spices as we count down our time here.

Interpretation: One thing I found really interesting with this is the sites I found when searching for "mrs beetons potato salad" online.  Here's a sampling and you can see that different modern people interpreted the recipe slightly differently.  I think this is why our challengers want us to go directly to the source and put our own spin on the recipes.

1988 Newspaper article referencing her salad (changed her directions of salad oil to say extra light olive oil)

Modern blog with her own twist

Time to Research: about one hour of paging through cookbooks to pick a recipe and including the time to figure out what in the world salad oil was.

Prepping the tarragon vinegar.  I dumped dried tarragon in a glass jar with some white vinegar and left it for a week.

My potatoes.  Don't they look fun?

When slicing them, the spotted effect was unnoticeable but they did have some that had red coloring inside.

All my ingredients ready.  Once the potatoes are cooked and cooled, this recipe goes together really fast.

The finished product.