Nothing says summer like a classic American potato salad with mayonnaise, yellow mustard and the crunchy bite of red bell peppers. Recipe below.

I was going to attempt on of our favorite dishes from our trip to New Mexico this week. But a relentless onslaught of vegetarian houseguests and hot, muggy weather dissuaded me from making a meaterrific dish that would need at least a couple of hours in the oven. So instead, I turned the kitchen over to Marion, who made this perfect taste of summer.

At our house, a lot of the food we love is something we’ve come to in adulthood, and even recently. Part of this is because of the great revolution of American eating habits, which has so thoroughly swept up our household. Now so many foodstuffs and cuisines are so accessible to so many of us. We eat not just to live, but to keep ourselves healthy, to entertain our palates and to experience the infinite variations of this most evanescent of art forms.

Thanks to the food revolution, we are all not just aware of a world of flavors and styles, but we seek them out and demand them in their best and most authentic versions. A food that, 20 years ago, might have been impossible to find or too bizarre to even consider putting in the vicinity of your face, much less in your actual mouth, today is just one more delicious dish joining the rainbow of deliciousness available to us all. At least half of my own lexicon of vital, beloved flavors is composed of things I never met as a child. Vietnamese fish sauce; miso; Époisses; lemongrass; seaweed; crème brulee; dried daylily buds: As another minor example, although I grew up in Detroit on an almost exclusively Eastern Europe diet [with daring family forays into things founded on Jell-o or onion soup mix], today there are periods when I eat as much Szechwanese food as, well, people in Szechwan.

But potato salad is a message from childhood. There is such an amazing spectrum of potato salads—warm, cold, mayo-based, vinaigrette-based, with bacon, with anchovies, crudites, pesto, curry, toasted cumin, with roasted tomatoes, with smoked turkey, with no potatoes whatsoever [“mock potato salad,” based on kohlrabi, on the wonderful site chow.com]. You can explore this universe of potato salads, but, let’s face it, in the end, for almost everyone I know, the potato salad you love best and always return to is the potato salad you learned as a child.

This to me is the index classic American potato salad, the one I am most faithful to—mayonnaise-based, and the reason why we always have a plastic squeeze bottle of French’s yellow mustard in our refrigerator. It is almost identical to my mother’s recipe—one of the very few American dishes she ever seriously tried. Her original also included fresh chopped dill, which I also add when I remember to pick it up at the market, and was always finished with an ornamental hard-boiled-egg slice, a sunburst of thin pepper slices, and a delicate sprinkling of paprika on top. Continue reading “Potato salad: A classically done American classic” →