Salt-And-Vinegar Hot Potato Salad: or, Better than I knew I could wish it to be

I can't think of a sound argument against potatoes and bacon.

Salt And Vinegar Hot Potato Salad 4 cups sliced new potatoes 6 strips bacon, chopped 1 tbsp flour ¼ cup vinegar 1½ tsp salt ½ tsp pepper ½ cup water 1 sliced green onion* Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Meanwhile, fry the bacon until crisp in a large pan. Stir in the flour and blend well. Add the vinegar, salt, pepper, water, and the (thinly sliced) white part of the green onion. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Drain and add the potatoes. Gently mix. Stir in the rest of the green onion just before serving. If you cook the potatoes ahead of time, you can reheat them with the sauce in the top of a double boiler (or the microwave, of course!). *the original recipe calls for one tablespoon sliced green onions, but who wants to cram those into a tiny measuring spoon? Chicago Tribune, undated (1930s or 1940s?)

This recipe comes from my great-grandmother's binder. She pasted two hot potato salads onto the same page, but this one starts with bacon.

First off, I love that picture and want a copy of it to hang in the kitchen. It goes past strange and straight to art. I almost want to say it's "geometric" and "art-deco inspired," but maybe I'm just a bit bedazzled from seeing hot dogs and sandwich bread arranged with so much intentionality. This puts our modern-day party trays to shame. 

Getting down to the salad, I love how the writers let us economically dodge the cost of hot dog buns. Instead, we have a decorative, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of sandwich bread and sausage. (Well, if you consider hot dogs to be sausage...) I supposed you're supposed to take a piece of bread and then plonk a wiener on top of it?

If you add a few condiments, it looks like a very nice one-tray meal. But I have a hard time imagining following the newspaper's advice to serve this at a "picnic supper" unless I packed a chafing dish.

Getting down to spuds, I decided to do everything involving a cutting board before I turned on the stove. I don't always manage that kind of advance planning, so it's nice when I think of it. Aside from sliced potatoes, the recipe calls for "one tablespoon sliced green onions, including tops." I briefly tried measuring them out properly, but I can't reconcile green onions and level tablespoons.

Moving down the ingredient list, we're using a lot of bacon today. The newspaper may have named this "hot potato salad," but I think the bacon should have also gotten title billing.

I've never seen bacon look so bad. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But this mess looked more like a slimy heap of dead animal than most of the meat that passes through the kitchen, including the occasional recognizable organs.

As we learned from The Philadelphia Inquirer, chopping the bacon before cooking allows all the grease melts off better. 

I think that the recipe was more interested in harvesting the fat that melted off the bacon than the bacon itself. A lot of recipes call for bacon fat without using the bacon itself, but this one is perfect for those of us who no longer keep bacon grease jar next to the stove. 

In just a minute or two, the meat itself shrank to brown confetti, but the grease remained in abundance.

For some reason, the flour made the grease fizz.

We were now ready to add everything else to the pan except the potatoes, which were still boiling in the saucepan next door. As a recipe note, I omitted the tablespoon of sugar in the recipe. I don't know what it's supposed to do, but I don't like adding adding sugar to things that aren't sweet. Every time I make sloppy joes, I omit the brown sugar.

It kind of looks like cheese dip, doesn't it? After telling us to add the green onions at this point, the recipe suggests waiting until the end. If you're trying this at home (and if you like salt-and-vinegar chips you should), wait til you take the pan off the stove to add the green onions. They soon withered to nothing. But in this moment, everything looked really nice.

I thought the sauce was far too drippy at first, but after 5 minutes it became nice and creamy. Also, you'll notice that the green onions have all but vanished. Again, I should have taken the recipe writers' hint to ignore their own instructions. But at this point, only one thing remained: add the potatoes!

I didn't serve this with rye bread because do we really need carbs with a side of carbs? Also, I like that they don't suggest serving it with toasted rye bread. For one thing, toasters were still expensive. Also, since (I'm guessing) the depression was on, you didn't have to worry about uneaten toast going stale. Instead, you could just put the extra bread back into the breadbox.

The newspaper suggests serving this with frankfurters. I didn't think that was necessary when I was getting groceries. But as I served this, I couldn't help thinking "This would be great with hot dogs..." 

 

I shouldn't have been surprised this was so good. This was salt and vinegar bliss. If you like salt and vinegar chips, you owe it to yourself. But in full disclosure, the salad didn't reheat very well. The leftovers weren't bad, but they lost their zest after a night in the refrigerator. 

As a postscript, I have to note a fun variation I made on this. You see, others in the house had bought a frozen pizza a while ago and never bothered to eat it. As I watched it slowly get freezer-burnt in its own box, I thought to myself "I wonder if this is any good with pepperoni grease instead of bacon drippings..."

Things soon looked like someone's first-ever shift in a diner kitchen. Everything in the pan thickened up exactly as it should have, but it didn't look very good.

I never thought pepperoni would be almost too hot to handle. Rendering off the pepperoni grease and then cooking the meat in a gravy made of its own fat released a capsaicin payload I didn't know pepperoni had. Until today, I never knew pepperoni contained actual peppers. I always thought it was salt and an assortment of nitrates. 

Even though I omitted the salt, this was a lot saltier than I wanted it to be. The pepperoni-potato salad was fun in theory, but it just wasn't that great in practice. 

I want to say this is a nice recipe for hot weather since you don't turn on the oven. However, you do end up standing over two stove burners, one of which is steaming at you and the other is full of spattering grease. But even as I write this, I didn't regret purchasing enough spuds and bacon to make it again.