Stars and spuds forever: Potato salad is a great American summer side dish

The first time I made potato salad for my then-fiancé, I used new potatoes with the skins on, sour cream, scallions and fresh dill. He was horrified. He married me anyway, but he has never let me make potato salad again. Potato salad is a very personal thing, and there may be as many ways to boil potatoes and dress them as there are cooks in America.

Just ask Barbara Lauterbach, a New Hampshire-based cooking instructor, who has collected 50 of her favorite recipes in a new book called simply "Potato Salad." (Chronicle Books, 2002).

"Woe unto the new bride who would add fresh herbs or use Miracle Whip instead of Hellman's Mayonnaise to dress the heirloom recipe," she writes in her introduction. "Southerners hotly defend their potato salad, maintaining that it must include sweet pickle and hard-boiled egg, while in California, lemongrass and cilantro are just as often part of the mix. Some like hot, some like it cold, and some wouldn't consider eating it except at room temperature."

We tend to think of potato salad as distinctly American, but the mayonnaise-bound version that no Fourth of July picnic can be without is a recent invention. Look up potato salad in American cookbooks published in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and you'll likely find a recipe as rudimentary as the one offered in 1866 by Hannah Mary Bouvier Peterson, "a lady of Philadelphia and a practical housewife," which calls for boiling potatoes with onions, slicing them, mashing the onions, then stirring it all up in a warm pot with butter, salt, pepper and vinegar.

Warm potato salad tossed with vinegar, often flavored with bacon, came to be called German potato salad because it was associated with German immigrants in this country, according to John Mariani in "The Dictionary of American Food and Drink."

In the first edition of "The Joy of Cooking," published in 1931, Irma Rombauer supplies recipes for hot potato salad with bacon drippings as well as cold potato salad with mayonnaise. For the latter she tosses the boiled potatoes first with vinaigrette and soup stock before finishing the salad with mayonnaise, sour cream, or a boiled dressing made from egg, butter, mustard and cream. (Her suggested additions of olives, pickles, celery, cucumbers and capers seem pretty promiscuous for the times.)

In the late '50s, with middle-class Americans regularly firing up their backyard grills, potato salad came into its heyday. "A good potato salad is the mark of a good cook," states "Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook," published in 1956.

"Potato salad is the quintessential summer side dish," says Scott Simpson, chef and owner of Blue Onion Bistro. "It's compatible with everything and can be served hot or cold. Every chef, professional or amateur, should have one in their arsenal."

Simpson's favorite recipe and the one most popular at his lively University District eatery dresses Yukon Gold potatoes with dried dill, dill pickle juice, yellow mustard and mayonnaise.

At Kingfish Cafe on Capitol Hill, sous chef Taronce Vell mixes up 22 quarts of potato salad every day. Dijon mustard and apple-cider vinegar give a kick to Chef Kenyetta Carter's devilishly good Southern-style recipe. Sugar lends sweetness to the mayonnaise dressing, while sweet pickle relish, celery, red onion and red pepper add color and crunch. Vell advocates chilling the potatoes thoroughly before adding the dressing and advises home cooks to check and adjust the seasonings at the end.

If you're using vinaigrette dressing, most cookbook authors, including Lauterbach, recommend dressing the potatoes while they are still warm. She offers these additional useful tips in her book:

• Low-starch, waxy potatoes are best for salads because they tend to hold their shape better when cubed.

• Select potatoes of the same size, or cut them into same-size pieces if they are very large, to ensure uniform cooking.

• It's preferable not to peel potatoes before cooking for salads; they retain their shape better as well as their nutrients. And, potatoes peel more easily when they are warm.

• You can cook potatoes up to 24 hours ahead. Peel them, return them to the colander and pour 1 cup of distilled white vinegar over them to prevent discoloration. Cover the drained potatoes and refrigerate. (If the recipe you are making calls for vinegar after cooking, omit this step.)

Whether boiling or steaming potatoes, when done transfer them to a colander to drain, then return them to the warm cooking pan briefly, tossing them over low heat to dry them.

• You can obtain the flavor of onion without using raw onion in the salad by putting two medium, peeled yellow onions, halved, in the cooking water with the potatoes.

Potato salads come in many guises, as Lauterbach's book proves. The potatoes can be sweet or white, curried, grilled or ashed, laced with seafood or meat, doused with sesame oil, balsamic vinegar, pesto or tomatillo salsa.

The fanciest potato salad I've ever encountered accompanied a grilled squab at downtown's Brasa, the elegant dinner house run by chef Tamara Murphy and Bryan Hill: Tiny fingerling potatoes, diced beets, lacy frisée and crisp nubbins of foie gras glistened under a veil of truffle oil.

But Murphy confesses she doesn't put anything fancy in the potato salad she makes at home (though she does sometimes whip up a garlicky aioli instead of using the Best Foods mayonnaise she generally prefers.)

"I like potato salad with eggs and pickles and lots of good mayo," says this James Beard Award-winner. "There are some things that shouldn't be fussed with."