What Potato Salad Has Taught Me

Just One Family Staple

Photo by Rodrigo dos Reis on Unsplash

I prefer to use a paring knife. It is tradition.

I acquired a drawerful of white-handled paring knives when I sold Pampered Chef. These dollar knives were perfect and I cannot get them anymore. In my opinion, a vegetable peeler is for carrots. My husband disagrees.

Potatoes are part of my story. Sometimes I just feel like peeling potatoes and sometimes I need to make potato salad. My husband’s favorite meal is any number of combinations of chicken and potatoes.

I used to put the brown ribbons in the sink and down the garbage disposal. Now I use a recycled plastic bag to collect them and put them in the spinning compost bin. [It looks very much like the Price is Right’s big wheel in the Showcase Showdown.] The spud is held in the left hand. A smooth, just under the surface stripe length is lifted from one end to the other. Red potatoes are smaller with thinner skin so a lighter touch is needed. They are peeled raw unless it is for potato salad. In my mind, the white flesh holds together differently than if I boil them naked.

The peeling style was passed on from my Oma to me. Pulling “just so” to take an outer covering off to reveal a more delicate state. Peeling them makes them clean, even though you can eat the skin. I leave some when I make my mashed potatoes. It is a personal preference, like the knife.

Last year during Spring Break my husband’s three brothers traveled from Florida and next door to work on a house we are flipping across the lake for a week. I do not swing a hammer. I make sure everyone is fed and part of that responsibility is potato salad. My father-in-law made a mean potato salad that was requested whenever my in-laws went anywhere. My MIL would claim it was her recipe but everyone gave credit to Pop. Now I make bottomless potato salad for the whole spring and summer seasons.

Potato Salad is a staple in most families. Just like everyone has a pancake story, I believe everyone has a potato salad story too. Potato salad represents family to me. It is an icon of gatherings and celebrations. There are all kinds of connotations and stories around it including picnics and times of nostalgia.

The potato salad I grew up on was my Oma’s. It was a Christmas staple for the dinner menu that didn’t change for almost 40 years. The year after my Oma died my mother decided to change the menu. My Oma’s potato salad was not standard American potato salad. Her recipe has bologna, butter, Miracle Whip, and special German pickles I couldn’t get outside of Germantown in Chicago until Meijer started carrying them in their international aisle. Honestly, I was embarrassed it was a recipe so different from what people considered the standard taste and recipe of the dish.

After my Oma died we tried to figure out how to make the potato salad. I had watched her make it as a child. When I was a bit older I did write down what went into the potato salad after eating it, but had not watched my Oma make it. We were not allowed in the kitchen. There an ingredient missing for a while . My mother is not a cook and was no help in this department. I finally figured out that the color wasn’t right when I made it. Oma always added hot water to the potato salad after it sat for 24 hours to make it thinner. One day it hit me the secret ingredient was butter. Of course , it was.

I started making standard potato salad ten years ago. It was the talk of the family and requested often. My recipe has been compared to a restaurant recipe you can’t get anymore which was quite the compliment.

My process is particular and takes an afternoon. I boil the russet potatoes with the skins on. I make hard-boiled eggs by boiling the water first, adding the eggs and cooking for 13 minutes, then putting them in an ice bath for 5 minutes before peeling. The potatoes are peeled hot. Well, as hot as I can stand to hold them in a towel.

I have a special secret ingredient that gets added to the hot potatoes in the bowl. Onion, mayonnaise, celery, salt and pepper are added. It seems simple but lots is riding on it.

My Oma began the practice of having a bowl exclusely for the potato salad. I inherited it. Then before I left the house that I was getting divorced from it fell from the top shelf of the pantry and shattered on the kitchen tile floor.

I did not cry. I swept up the pieces and put them in the garbage and thought nothing of it.

I found a replacement bowl at Target that looked similar to the old bowl and moved it around with me to 6 residences after that. When I was in the process of moving to Wisconsin I came home to find my husband at the time had dropped it while he was packing. He put it back into the cabinet and when I reached for it a large chunk from the bottom fell out. It looked like a large ceramic donut with the hole in the middle.

I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor and sobbed holding it to my chest.

I still do not understand why the new bowl produced this reaction and not Oma’s bowl. This time felt more permanent.

Now there is a new bowl. It is a Pampered Chef one I earned from being a consultant and it has a locking lid. It is white, plastic, and no one is allowed to use it or put anything else in it. It is the potato salad bowl. Exclusively.

My plan was to make a batch on the first day of Spring to begin Potato Salad season but life got in the way. [Tomato season is coming soon too!] In my life now I am in the process of reprogramming many places and rituals because I live in the same area as I lived past lives with some not so great memories. Slowly, it seems to be working.

My Oma is the person who raised me to be who I am. I learned the most from her and making her potato salad and now my own version is just one of the ways I honor her. She will have been gone 25 years on April 1st and there are days that I feel like she just died. I am tearing up typing this sentence now feeling her absence. There are days I ache to tell her what my life is like now and how amazing my son is. I want desperately to hear her stories of being in East Germany working on the streetcar and to hear her say Prost at Sunday dinner of roast, boiled potatoes , gravy and green stuff. I forget the sound of her voice and wish I could hear it again. How I cook now is how she lives on. She taught me the constant ingredient infused into food is love. She taught me well.

Now I have to go make that potato salad!