Potato Salad Is the Best, Most American Dish We Have. Here’s Why.

I recently found myself drowning in potato salad recipes. I wish I knew why this happened. An idea had taken over me, and I was trying to at least apply the pressure to investigate, if not to dismiss it.

So I turned to Bonnie Slotnick, who runs a store specializing in rare and antique cookbooks in Manhattan’s East Village, and began pummeling every book she could find with a potato salad recipe.

What we found took us from the late 19th century to four potato salad recipes in the 1943 “Settlement Cookbook” and the joyful wanderlust in Clementine Paddleford’s 1960 compendium “How America Eats.” I reviewed Mimi Sheraton’s 1965 “German Cookbook” with instructions for one hot and one cold potato salad. I saw the exuberant boldness that permeated the 1969 “Princess Pamela’s Soul Food Cookbook” and admired the more elegantly worldly approach of sisters Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden-Lloyd’s 1978 book, “Spoon Bread and Strawberry Wine.” All classics.

Really, I was looking for validation. Could what I was feeling be true? Because what I felt was that it sounded kind of ridiculous and was: Potato salad is the Great American Dream Food.

In any given year, potato salad is what you put or bring to gatherings between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But now, as this country turns 250 years old, I think a barrel full of mayo-soaked (or buttered) Yukon gold has even greater significance. most characteristic american dish we have, we have constantly There was.

I can hear you already: What about hot dogs? The hot dog says “America”. I just read a love letter Costco’s hot dog gave me pause for thought about the unique magnificence of potato salad. But when was the last time you made a hot dog from scratch and took it to dinner?

I believe Potato salad is the best thing you can give an American variety. Not because it’s the tastiest or the most beautiful, but don’t ignore either. I believe this in part because everyone can make and bring some. Just potatoes and a bunch of other stuff.

When someone new comes to this country, they learn somehow! – that this is the food you bring to a meeting. This is the dish that shows a desire to understand this place, and they seem to have heard that this bowl full of oiled tubers is the way to go. Depending on who you hear this from and where you’re coming from, you can add some dried pork, a spoonful of gochujang, or a jar of capers.

This is your contribution to the complexity of this dish, your culture to ours, your contribution to the promise of this place. This is an offer that can say both “welcome” and “we”.

It seems like every culture in America already has some expression of potato salad. Jewish deli. Japanese. German. Calabrian Nepali. bodega A dear friend of mine is Peruvian and she knows it from potatoes. He told me that in Peru they have ensalada rusa, and in Spain they have ensaladilla rusa: potatoes, carrots, peas and sometimes cubed beets with mayonnaise. Someone brought Beety Rusa to this Texas barbecue!

Potato salad is not a meal. This is an accompaniment, support for everything that surrounds it. It brings the plate together and soothes the palate. It completes the frying and cools the hot ones. Trustworthy. This is expected.

It can also get a little wild. Give it a try. Innovate. Regardless, we eaters think the facts of your food are self-evident.

It’s also true that potato salad can be polarizing. The choice of mayonnaise could start a war all by itself. Please break your miracle elsewhere. If no one brings potato salad, an existential violation has occurred: How come no one cares enough to bring potato salad?

But also: Who has the courage to meet the moment? Potato salad is the Thanksgiving turkey of summer peaks. No one will forget when you messed this up. (Conversely, we’ll all rejoice whenever you dip your toe in.) I love potato salad for this. If streamlining our founding documents is a cause, imagine a constitutional agreement to define potato salad. It’s the most divisive food we’ve ever had, and we admit we’d feel incomplete without it. A true soul food.

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Who knows when I became a potato salad person? Probably when someone in my family (my mother, born Judith Lavern Smith) realized that I could even grab a knife and get rid of an onion. I will say that I am 11 years old.

Mom’s potato salad was so oniony it bit you. For a sous chef, this meant taking a softball as close to liquid as your sinuses would allow. I quartered the onion, chopped it, presented it for inspection, failed, then went ahead and chopped it until it passed. This may take half an hour. My mother needed less than five minutes. But if she was making potato salad, that usually meant she was making something else, too. And something else and then something else. So even a slow helper helped.

When I turned 14, I graduated to taking on more tasks: mincing celery, pulverizing sometimes a dozen eggs, peeling and dicing potatoes, sprinkling mustard, smothering the zest to squeeze out every drop of syrup, scooping out Hellmann and sprinkling it over everything else.

When it was time for the paprika, salt, black pepper and, incidentally, a pinch of sugar, my mother took over. It is perfectly normal to trust a child with a paring knife. Bad parenting is entrusting someone with the spices.

Everyone loved my mom’s potato salad. They were able to taste the love (and labor, so to speak). This was actually the recipe his grandmother used and now it’s the potato salad I make. Each bite contains every ingredient. So you get to enjoy the creaminess and crunch, the sweetness and – now that I am a seasoned spice person – the heat of the paprika. This is a lively, vibrant dish with a combination of texture, flavor and color. Never once did I consider that this harmony was a family affair, more than what my mother learned from her grandmother.

It wasn’t until I started flipping through the Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks and sat with the recipes that Bonnie tirelessly presented to me that I could see a story taking shape. From books by Black authors, or books that might claim to be Black authors (e.g., a white woman published what she swore were her cook’s recipes), my people’s potato salad turns out to be more or less My People’s: variations of mustard and mayonnaise, eggs and onions, sometimes celery and cucumber.

My family has never had a recorded recipe. Like music and storytelling, food was knowledge, a byproduct of slavery; It was an institution that denied literacy to enslaved people out of fear of what a literate slave could accomplish. We did. We made potato salad. What I found in Bonnie was history. What I found was a legacy.

However! Another thing to appreciate about this dish is that, for example, macaroni and cheesePotato salad is not a product of enslavement. Black Americans have a claim on this, but it doesn’t belong to anyone.

This country’s covenants with the pursuit of individual liberty and happiness, justice, and equal protection may seem false, impossible, and elusive. Not when it comes to potato salad. Potato salad is agreement and country—this wet tangle of harmonic rapprochement achieved only through imagination, patience, and a kind of violence (Lots. Lots. Chopping), but also some fidelity to our basic, worldly values.

This dish is a gift that Americans have given each other for the last 250 years. A food that insists we belong.

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