Madeleine Roux : Moveable feast
It’s hard to make a really bad potato salad. The two most likely ways are to undercook the potatoes and add salad cream and raw onion rings. Alas, this awful concoction is a regular at otherwise delightful school bazaars and old-fashioned braais on the platteland.
Most potato salads are sublime. The soft, bitey cubes slathered in a creamy mayonnaise made with best olive oil, spiked with flavoured vinegar and ground black pepper, all look great piled into a nest of lettuce or spinach leaves.
Potato salad needs colour. Forget about grandma’s cut-glass dish. Use your brightest ceramics or a long, flat, wooden bowl. Colour up the salad with herbs like thyme, mint and strips of nasturtium leaves.
Fried red sweet peppers are a brilliant addition to potato salad. Cut into strips and fry gently in olive oil with a few cloves of garlic cut diagonally.
Add a few grinds of black pepper. Cut warm, cooked potatoes into chunks, add the peppers and garlic and their oil. Sprinkle on quite a lot of lemon juice and salt and serve warm.
There are many variations on this theme. Fry a few mushrooms before adding to the salad. Or chop a boiled egg and a few pecan nuts and make a vinaigrette that includes a few drops of sesame oil.
Green beans are a lovely addition to potato salad. Steam them and add whole to warm cooked potatoes. Make a lot of dressing with at least 370ml olive oil, a teaspoon mustard, juice of two lemons and lots of seasoned salt.
Dress salad while it’s warm and add a handful of chopped spring onions or chives at the last minute. Or fresh dill.
The tingling bite of blue cheese offsets the blandness of cooked potato. Slice spuds into a bowl and add some crisply fried and crumbled bacon.
Make the dressing in a blender by adding bits of blue cheese and a lot of parsley to your basic vinaigrette, and pour over the salad.
Celery, gherkins and watercress add crunch to potato salad. A sharper taste is provided by capers and anchovies.
For chilli lovers, flecks of fresh, green or red chilli complete a potato salad. Several kinds of cold meat, like ham, tuna or even salami, also taste great. Sprinkle paprika over the salad for extra colour.
Bought salad cream (stupidly called mayonnaise), is dreadful, mild-looking stuff with a taste like the clank of metal. If you have to buy mayo, choose Hellman’s and thin with lemon.