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What's For Dinner? v19.51: Potato Salad Potluck! Bring your favorite and pick up some new ideas [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-21

Potato salad. Is this one of the dishes where there are as many versions as there are cooks?

A brief exchange in the WFD comments this spring turned up an unusual take on potato salad (tuna!), and I’m sure there are a lot more versions out there. What better day to immerse ourselves in potato salad than the first full day of summer!

This is intended to be a sort of Potato Salad Open Thread, but as usual, please also tell us What’s For Dinner at your house, and about your other good foods.

I’m bringing three potato salads, totally different from each other. I love them all.

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Let’s start with Mom’s, the most basic, absolutely plain, and totally yummy potato salad.

Mom’s potato salad. Five ingredients, including salt.

My Mom’s potato salad…

..does not come with measurements, of course. Super simple, plainest of the plain. Mom never used anything but Russet potatoes, and always peeled them. Cut the peeled potatoes into largish bite-sized chunks, boil till done (15-20 minutes) in well-salted water. Drain and allow to cool. Also hard-boil a few eggs. (I put the eggs into the boiling water with the potatoes and fish them out with a wok strainer after ten minutes. Mom did not have a wok strainer :) Shell the cooled eggs and cut into moderate chunks, white and yolk together. Place the cooled eggs and potatoes in a bowl large enough to turn them over with a strong mixing spoon, salt briefly (but taste the potatoes first — the salted water might have been enough), then mix with a small bit of yellow mustard and a larger bit of commercial mayonnaise. Keep chilled*. Amounts, sorta: I used about 2 ¼ lb potatoes, boiled 4 eggs but decided not to open the last one b/c 3 looked like enough, added a generous/sloppy tsp of mustard and an also generous/sloppy about ¼ cup mayonnaise. [The fourth egg was later Deviled.] Variations: Dill makes a nice addition. Also looks good. Mr pixxer insists this needs chopped celery for crunch. Excellent addition.

We use Dijon b/c that’s what we have.

Yukon Golds boil well, and also work well in this salad.

Fresh dill, left over from another recipe, was great added to the leftover salad

Paprika sprinkled over the top is very pretty.

If I’m feeling ambitious, I will scrub the potatoes, but I find peeling much easier than getting the @)(#*&%$@ things clean.

Potato salad with tarragon and vinegar (see top image)

Saveur, special edition.

Our grocery store is the renowned Berkeley Bowl, which, like other groceries, has temptations to grab you as you wait (not long, usually) to check out. Except at the Bowl, the goodies are interesting magazines, not candy or the National Inquirer. One day I picked up A Taste of Summer, and was taken by this recipe. Turns out this was a special edition from Saveur (to which I later subscribed after Conde-Nast killed Gourmet ).

I hope you can still find the edition, though if not, the website with Saveur recipes would be a good bet — I loved cooking from that magazine.

Potato Salad (what an unassuming name!) Wash and dry 3 Tbsp of fresh tarragon, and chop. (This takes longer than you think, b/c tarragon, being two-dimensional, doesn’t fill up volumes very quickly ;) Clean 2 lb fingerling potatoes and cut into halves, or if large, quarters, so they are sorta the same size. Boil in salted water till tender — usually 10-15 minutes. While the potatoes cook, peel and mince 1 shallot. Drain the finished potatoes, and immediately mix thoroughly with 3 Tbsp vinegar, the shallots and tarragon, as well as salt and pepper “to taste”. [My notes say ¼ tsp salt — YMMV.] Let the potatoes cool a bit, then refrigerate. Once the potatoes are pretty cool, mix in 3-4 Tbsp mayonnaise (amazing how little you need) and keep chilled*.

Hot potato salad from Alan Hooker

1970, and still in active use

This is a great side dish for a winter meal, but it works in the summer too. It’s from Alan Hooker’s 1970 cookbook Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery, a gift from the most excellent in-laws, who also took us to his (ironically?) named restaurant in Ojai, The Ranch House. VGC has been one of our favorite cookbooks since then, still in use well into the 21st Century.

I expect the book has undergone some editing since our edition was published. There were some problematic quirks; for example, a cauliflower soup (to die for!) has an ingredients list at the top, then instructions, which end with “Top with lots of grated cheddar cheese. The cheese is very important.” Only problem is, the cheese is not in the ingredients list! Until I underlined that instruction in red, I would suddenly notice it halfway through cooking and have to send somebody out to buy cheddar cheese. LOL!

This hot potato salad recipe is really just a recipe for the boiled dressing. The amounts of potatoes and scallions over which to pour this amount of dressing are not included. The picture shows the potatoes and scallions that I used, and the amount of dressing worked really well for them. Again, about 2ish lb potatoes. These are Yukon Golds.

Hot Potato Salad ingredients, minus the boiled dressing.

Alan Hooker’s Potato Salad With Country Boiled Dressing Begin by cubing your potatoes, and slicing scallions. I sometimes peel the potatoes for this salad, thinking that the lack of skin should allow the vinegar dressing to penetrate better. No idea if that is true. Didn’t this time (very clean potatoes), and it was great. Use the green parts, too — I just stopped here b/c I liked the image :) The greens have a terrific taste, and also look good in the salad. Then boil the potatoes till done, probably about 15 minutes. Test with a fork. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, mix: 1 cup water

3 Tbsp sugar

4 Tbsp vinegar (This is also ¼ cup, which is easier to measure...) [I used Cider vinegar b/c in 1970 that is most likely what “vinegar” meant.]

¾ tsp dry mustard

3/8 tsp salt Then beat in 1 egg When potatoes are almost done, bring the dressing to a boil. Drain the cooked potatoes and place potatoes and scallions in a heated bowl (or just return the drained potatoes, with scallions, to the potato saucepan, which is, after all, hot). Pour the dressing over the potatoes and scallions, mix, and serve immediately. Hot potato salad with boiled dressing. Serve it in a bowl to keep the yummy dressing close. The leftovers work cold. Again, refrigerate asap what you don’t eat right away. B/c...

*— Food safety notes —

A couple decades ago, there arose a tendency to pooh-pooh concerns about mayonnaise. The story was that mayonnaise is not actually harmful, it doesn’t have Salmonella, the implication being that really, you don’t have to worry about it sitting out there in the sun at the picnic. This is NOT TRUE — you do have to worry about it. But the true part is: it’s not the fault, precisely, of the mayonnaise. The mayo doesn’t start with Salmonella and friends in it (we hope), but it’s an absolutely terrific culture medium. It is much too easy to spike the stuff with all sorts of unfortunate bacteria as you mix it into your potato salad. It’s the stuff on your hands, counters, and cooking implements that can get into the potato salad (and other mayoey things) and make you really sick. Bacteria can double in number in as little as 20 minutes, under favorable conditions. “Favorable conditions” means warmish, for many of them, and foodish, which is what the mayo offers. If you’re going to bring a mayo-based food of any kind to a picnic, consider bringing an outer bowl and filling it with ice, and putting your salad bowl into the ice bed, or else just keep the salad on ice in a cooler. Have a great summer, everyone!

What’s for Dinner? is a Saturday evening get-together where friends share recipes, talk about good food and help others answer culinary questions. We welcome you to our virtual table every Saturday evening 4:30 PT/7:30 ET. If you would like to write a post for an upcoming date just send a message to ninkasi23, or reply to her upcoming schedule in the Comments below. We also have a handy post with links from our archives here: Master Index 2014-2021

So — what’s for dinner at your house?

have any potato salad recipes to share?

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