Southern Style Potato Salad

Oct 15

*A dish that grew in popularity in the Great Depression once mayonnaise became commercially available and widely distributed.*

Potatoes, cooked in wine and dressed with vinegar and spices, was a dish allegedly introduced to the New World by Spanish explorers in the 16th Century. The first known published recipes for Potato Salad appeared in the mid-19th Century and was brought to America by German immigrants who dressed potatoes in oil, vinegar and herbs. It wasn't until the 1920s and particularly until the Great Depression of the 1930s that mayonnaise, by this time widely and commercially available, found its way out of the Deep South and is today generally considered as Southern Style Potato Salad. Search for it online it and you'll find a lot of disinformation about what constitutes "Southern Style." Since I've lived in five states in the South and have eaten this common fare in all of them, I can speak with some authority on what makes "Southern Style" Southern.

To be sure, there are tons of regional variations and every kitchen has their own little twist on a basic recipe. But there are six necessary ingredients to be genuine to the original thought behind this dish, which grew in popularity because it was filling and inexpensive to make, not to mention delicious.

First and foremost, Southern Style Potato Salad uses one and only one kind of potato: Russets. Why? Because during the Great Depression, it was about the only potato available and certainly the cheapest.

Now, you can make potato salad out of other kinds of potatoes, like Yukon Gold or New Potatoes. You can substitute any other kind of potato in this recipe, and that's fine. But to be truly "Southern Style," Russets are non-negotiable. Some people think Russets aren't a good potato to use in any potato salad because they get mushy. For instance, here's some dubious culinary advice from a 2009 article on the NPR website, Rethinking Potato Salad:

Use waxy rather than floury potatoes, such as Yukon Gold, Red Bliss and Fingerlings. They have a creamy texture yet keep their shape well when cooked. Although Russet potatoes are exceptionally tender, they don't hold their shape well when boiled and tend to get mushy.

Wrong! They don't hold their shape and tend to get mushy if you overcook them.

The other five ingredients that must be present in the dish to qualify for the moniker of "Southern" are: boiled egg, onion, pickles or, more commonly, some type of pickle relish, mustard and mayonnaise, and substituting Miracle Whip for mayonnaise is never allowed.

The type of onion to use is an issue of some debate. Some people like sweet yellow onions, such as Vidalia, Walla-Walla or the Texas-1015. Other people like red onion. I think very few cooks would use regular yellow onion and certainly not Bermuda white onions which would completely overpower the dish.

I prefer green onions. They are mild and brighter in flavor than their fatter cousins and they add more color to the plate. It's likely that potato salads of the Great Depression era probably mostly used green onions because they are easy to grow in any garden. In some areas of the south, they grow wild.

Everything else is window dressing. Some recipes add celery or green bell pepper. Fine. I think celery is probably the more common addition to the basic ingredient list and in point of fact, my recipe requires it. Not bell pepper, though. I personally think a bell pepper competes with the overall flavor profile of the dish rather than aligns with it.

The only two culinary skills one really needs to make this recipe is the ability to chop vegetables into relatively small and consistent shapes. The other is to keep a close eye on the kitchen timer. You do not want to overcook your potatoes but neither do you want them under-cooked, and the window of time between those two events is very short.