Cold Potatoes

As a child, one of the few foods I couldn't get behind was potato salad. Despite my eagerness to sample all the world's edibles, I remained a potato conservative. Potatoes should be hot, I was convinced, and they should be accompanied by butter. Cream and cheese were also desirable. Cold potatoes drowned in mayo struck me as belonging in the same league as the culinary travesties concocted by my great-grandmother in her final years. In fact, I first sampled potato salad at her table and for some time labored under the delusion that she had invented it-perhaps on the same day she first combined cabbage with rhubarb.

The years passed, and I learned that some potato salads are better than others. Less mayo, potatoes that aren't overcooked, some onion and celery to enhance the flavor-all these alterations helped create much more acceptable versions than my great-grandmother's. I especially appreciated German potato salad-hot and no mayo. There was a deli in Poughkeepsie where they really knew how to make it. Chuck, however, prefers the cold mayo-ridden kind. I learned to produce a sort of compromise: firm potatoes, room temperature, plenty of onion and celery, a touch of oil and vinegar; and then light on the mayo. So by the time we got into serious low-fat eating, I had eaten, and prepared, a lot of potato salad of the kind that lends itself to nutritional correctness. No one who eats my potato salad believes it's low in fat. One guy who did threatened to take it out and have it analyzed. Try the recipe. It really works.

The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook:
A Good Natured Guide to Healthful Eating with 100 Recipes
By Barbara and Tamar Haspel
Scribner
Hardback, $22.00
Publication date: April 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85454-6
Recipe Reprinted by permission.