Making Eudora Welty’s Vicksburg Potato Salad at Home

A wonderful dish to bring to summer picnics

The great 20th-century American author Wallace Stegner said, “Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.” In the spirit of Stegner’s statement, I have always been drawn to foods that are very particular to a place. The anchovies of Cetara on the southwest coast of Italy. Pesto from Genoa. The Pinquito beans from the Central Valley of California that the Roadhouse has had on its special list. Paesano, the bread of Puglia. Comté from the Franche-Comté region of France. Foods that are from one particular place, and whose entire essence emanates out from that origin.

Vicksburg Potato Salad is far less known than all those others I listed, but it’s been embedded in my mind ever since I first read about it in The Food of a Younger Land, the compilation of the WPA-sponsored project on American cuisine, edited by Mark Kurlansky. The essays in the book, which date to the 1930s, include some of the country’s great writers—Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few—sharing thoughts on regional American eating back in the dark days of the Depression.

The potato salad popped up in Eudora Welty’s section about Mississippi. Born in Jackson in 1909, Welty spent most of her life there and became one of the South’s most celebrated writers. When she wrote this piece for the WPA, she was just another young writer trying to make her way in the world. It was part of a pamphlet she created that was originally distributed on mimeographed sheets. She would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter in 1973 and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Alongside her fiction, Welty was also a wonderful photographer, capturing rural Southern life during the Depression. She died in 2001 at age 92, leaving behind a legacy that continues to shape American literature.

I think what really drew my attention to the potato salad was Welty’s statement that “Yankees are welcome to make these dishes.” I took her at her word and went to it. Welty writes, intriguingly, that the Vicksburg Potato Salad, made with a lot of mustard, is “wickedly hot.” Since he was born in Vicksburg, I checked in with Bill Ferris about the potato salad. (I wrote about Bill’s amazing work with folklore and his exceptional ability to encourage people to tell their stories. Additionally, I’ll add, his book about the blues, Give My Poor Heart Ease, is beautiful.) “The Vicksburg Hotel no longer exists,” he explained. “It was located on Clay Street, and I remember going there as a child when my father got his hair cut. They had a large barbershop on the street level with five or six chairs where men sat while they had their hair cut. It was a magical place for a young child.”

Making the salad at home is super easy. As per “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” the better the potatoes you use, the better the salad will taste. I made it with the terrific Tantré Farm potatoes that I picked up at Argus Farm Stop, but Yukon Golds from the supermarket work well too. Start by cubing just-cooked potatoes (Welty’s recipe calls for a quart). Add a lot of chopped hard-cooked egg (three, she says). Add a whole green pepper, chopped fine—it cuts the richness of the dish. And a couple roasted red peppers, also finely chopped. Mix it all with a generous amount of mayonnaise, plus the standard salt and freshly ground pepper (we have a wide range of great ones) to taste, and a good bit of spicy mustard. Crumble a bunch of good bacon on top. For the bacon, I like a bigger, smoky one for this dish—Broadbent’s or Benton’s would both be beautiful options. (Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon will give you a lot more insight into bacon histories and flavors.)

Back in Ms. Welty’s world, the mayonnaise she’d have used certainly wasn’t store-bought; Hellman’s and Duke’s were modern convenience foods back then. As she wrote in the forward to The Jackson Cookbook, published in 1971, “Mayonnaise had a mystique.” Between that and the “wickedly hot” thing, she certainly had my attention. Proper mayonnaise was always prepared in the home. “Little girls,” Welty went on,

were initiated into it by being allowed to stand at the kitchen table and help make it, for making mayonnaise takes three hands. While the main two hands keep up the uninterrupted beat in the bowl, the smaller hand is allowed to slowly add the olive oil, drop-by-counted-drop. The solemn fact was that sometimes mayonnaise didn’t make. Only the sudden dash of the red pepper onto the brimming, smooth-as-cream bowlful told you it was finished and a triumph.

And to put it fully in context, she concluded, “Of course you couldn’t buy mayonnaise, and if you could, you wouldn’t. For the generation bringing my generation up, everything made in the kitchen started from scratch, too.” This homemade mayonnaise issue is not something to take lightly. Culinary historian Marcie Ferris, Bill’s wife and an Arkansas native, told me that,

Bill’s mom told me that a true Southern woman ALWAYS has HOME-MADE mayonnaise and home-made sweet pickles in the refrigerator (and a tin of beaten biscuits in the pantry … just in case, guests arrive—to serve with stiff drinks of bourbon, and a slice of country ham or pimento cheese!

So there you go … It’s “just potato salad,” but clearly it’s also so much more. Find a kid in your family and initiate them into mayonnaise-making. Make some potato salad with local eggs, good potatoes, and any one of the great bacons we’ve got on hand. Make it wickedly, seriously, hot, I hope. And get a copy of Ms. Welty’s work and do some reading while the potatoes are cooking.