Southern Recipe Restoration Project

Potato salad is one of those “particular” dishes, as in, people tend to be very particular about how theirs is made: sweet relish vs. chopped dill pickle; lots of mustard vs. none at all; white onion vs. green onions. In this Saving Southern Food installment, we look at one potato salad recipe with a “secret” ingredient. And it isn’t paprika.

The contributor: Sue Lynch of Fayetteville. This recipe comes from Lynch’s 90-year-old mother, Frances Huber of Rustburg, Va.

The story: “Rustburg is a small town where everybody knows everybody. And when I was growing up there in the 1950s, everybody knew my mother made the best potato salad. She still does. ... It’s because of what she called a 'secret’ ingredient: butter. She never claimed it was her secret ingredient, because an older friend shared it with her right after my mother got married.
“Mother would boil the potatoes whole in their jackets, then peel them while they were still hot. I still remember her standing in that kitchen peeling them with her bare hands, tossing them back and forth trying not to burn her fingers. Then she’d cut them up into cubes. While they were still hot, she’d cut up a half stick of butter and let it melt over the potatoes. That was the 'secret.’
“But there were a couple of other steps that I would say are key. Mother always did very fine mincing of everything; the onions, celery, pimento, pickles. ...
“She’d combine everything with Hellmann’s mayonnaise and put it into a yellow flowered pottery bowl. The last key, though, was to let the salad sit out a little while after she’d made it, before putting it in the refrigerator, to let the flavors meld. That’s usually when we’d eat the first bites. "
— As told to Rosalind Bentley


Butter and pimento make this potato salad special. Although Huber seems to have been tough enough to peel and chop potatoes that were hot enough to melt the butter, you can save yourself some pain by letting the potatoes cool to lukewarm before handling them -- and then melting the butter before adding to the potatoes.