Bobby Finger's (Parents') Potato Salad
The EXCLUSIVE recipe from this week's HOTTEST fiction debut!!
I love a lot of things about Bobby Finger’s1 new book, The Old Place, which I gobbled up in a single day this summer. I love that it is kind but not dogmatically nice; I love how Bobby renders the small town of Billington, TX, with the care and color and meticulousness of a Richard Scarry book. But most importantly I love how the book turns potato salad into a weaponized gauntlet of Southern womanhood.
Mary Alice Roth, a schoolteacher who has been forced into retirement and replaced by new-to-town New Yorker Josie Kerr, approaches her job as Annual Church Picnic Planner with military rigor and soap opera passive aggressiveness. Each year, her least favorite woman in town must make tens of pounds of potato salad, following a painstaking hand-written recipe that requires chopping the potatoes just so, boiling them the day before the picnic, the dreaded task of peeling them after boiling, clearing everything else out of the fridge to let them cool COMPLETELY overnight, and then glopping them together with the mayonnaise and other fixings before carrying all that mass to the church. Watching Josie, unassuming and stubbornly bright-eyed, receive the recipe is like watching a cheery young couple arrive at a remote cabin at the beginning of a horror movie. It’s not the central conflict of the book, but for my money it’s the most fun one.
For Mary Alice, Bobby told me when I insisted on interviewing him about potato salad, “assigning the potato salad, it's almost like writing lines on the chalkboard in detention or something. It's not that it's hard. It's not that it's in any way complicated. It's just tedious. And it takes a long time. I'm sure the potato salad would've tasted the same if Josie had just put mayonnaise on the hot potatoes instead of putting it on the cold potatoes.” It’s death by a thousand cuts, but you’re cutting a potato.
The salad in the book is inspired by a less-harrowing version of the dish from Bobby’s childhood. “The town itself is very much ripped from my childhood in the small town that I grew up in,” Bobby said, before confirming that potato salad is a Them. “There was this town picnic every year—I definitely like upped the drama [in the book]. But it was one of my favorite meals of the year, going to the church picnic and eating a bunch of barbecue and potato salad and coleslaw.” I’m currently at a residency in North Carolina and have been eating a lot of coleslaw and potato salad, so this resonates with me. His parents would often make the potato salad—something he saw them make normal amounts of the rest of the year, but whose picnic volume was always a shock.
Bobby very kindly got his mother to share her potato salad recipe. “The only other commentary she gave me,” Bobby said, “was screaming ‘ABSOLUTELY NO RELISH. NUH UH.’ when I asked if she ever used relish instead of chopped pickles.” Mrs. Finger, I promise to use pickles.
Bobby Finger’s Parents’ Potato Salad
Ingredients:
6-8 medium sized russet potatoes (boiled, cooled, peeled, cut into small pieces)
2 hard boiled eggs finely chopped
1/2 sweet onion, minced
1/2 cup dill pickles, finely chopped
Dressing
1/2 cup mayo ( more, if desired)
1 tablespoon mustard, yellow
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon pickle juice
Instructions
Cook potatoes in boiling water until they are tender
Remove from pot and cool
When cool, peel and chop into small chunks
In large bowl combine the potatoes, onion, eggs, and pickles
Toss gently
In another bowl combine mayo, mustard, and pickle juice. Whisk together.
Pour dressing over potatoes and mix gently. Add salt to taste.
Refrigerate until chilled, if desired
Here I must disclose that Bobby and I are friends, and that I am a paying subscriber of the Who? Weekly Patréon.