Mom and Dad on their wedding day (on the right)
27 November 1930
In my family Mom always made the potato salad and my sister Shirley always made the macaroni salad. We all believed (and still do) that they did it best. Mother's potato salad was very simple. Potatoes, celery, pimento, red onion, Best Foods mayonnaise (Hellman's if you are east of the Rockies), salt, pepper, vinegar. I think she might have had parsley also. She was adamant about not adding mustard or eggs in her potato salad.
So the potato salad I just made for today's festivities is basically that of my mother. I overcooked the potatoes, so it is a bit mushy. She would not approve. I used white balsamic vinegar from Modena. I think Mom would be totally cool with that. Where she used a jar of chopped pimento, drained, I chopped up a roasted red pepper. No real difference there. I used kosher salt and freshly ground pepper. Mother would not have thought of those options back in the 50s but would be fine them.
The parsley I use is Armenian parsley, as we always called it - what the rest of y'all call Italian or flat-leaf parsley. It has so much more flavor and I grew up on it, being surrounded by Armenian cooks and folks who learned from Armenian cooks. I let the parsley in my back yard go to seed two years ago. I now have three plants of it in various locations but did not want to harvest most of my leaves today. What truly amazed me was that the parsley from the first year overwintered.
All in all, today's product is recognizably my mother's potato salad in flavor profile and ingredients.
Mom was born in Fairfax, Missouri, and moved to California as a little girl. She was a good midwestern cook. Pepper and salt were her main spices; this was not French cuisine but it was honest, good-tasting, and satisfying. Trying to make a dish like she made feels good.
Here's to you, Hallie!
May you all eat something wonderful this Independence Day.
--the BB
