Category: Vegetables

Jerri’s Mom’s Potato Salad

When I was a boy, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day and was observed on May 30th. I don’t remember if my father had the day off from work, but we decorated the graves of my father’s grandmother and grandfather on that day or the Sunday nearest to it. They were buried in the small cemetery across the road from the white frame church where I was baptized and confirmed and where my parents are buried today.

It was Mom who planted the flowers on the graves each year at the end of May. She was usually joined by other women in the church who brought their children too. If it didn’t rain, it was fun for us kids.

I didn’t know that Decoration Day was started to remember soldiers killed in the Civil War and later extended to include all Americans who died serving in the military. Our families had not immigrated to the United States until after that war, and we did not have any close relatives who died in either the First or Second World War. But other families remembered loved ones who had served, and there were flags amid the flowers.

Most of the stones memorialized the old and the very young. Our family contributed some of the latter: My stillborn brother, “Baby Boy Rang,” and my father’s four-year-old brother Victor who died of “inflammation of the bowel” in a car on the gravel road that wound fifty miles through the north woods to the nearest hospital in Ashland, Wisconsin.

Sometime in the 1950’s we began calling it Memorial Day, and in 1968 Congress passed a law to make the fourth Monday in May Memorial Day, just so the gas companies could raise prices for the first three-day weekend of the summer. But whether we call it Decoration Day or Memorial Day, it is still a time to remember those who died as soldiers fighting for their country or as citizens who helped build our communities and nation.

Besides flowers, I always associate Memorial Day with summer. Sometimes it was cold and rainy, but this was the time when the Rang family would have its first picnic of the year. We would take hot dogs, beans and potato salad along with pop for us kids and beer for Mom and Dad to some lake nearby where we could fish a little, listen to the birds, pick flowers and watch tadpoles.

Memorial Day through Labor Day is potato salad season. As a full-blooded German, I like potato salad. Mom’s was very good, my sister Patsy’s and my sister-in-law Dee’s are excellent, but Jerri’s potato salad is outstanding. I have been known to get up in the night just so I could have another spoonful of the stuff.

Jerri learned to make her potato salad by watching her mother. Neither one of them had a recipe, so I had to force Jerri to list the ingredients, estimate quantities and explain what she did. This was a challenge. After I had entered the list into my trusty word processor I told her I thought it had hard-boiled eggs. “Oh, I forgot them. Boil four,” says she. You can appreciate my problem. Now that we have made it together, however, I can assure you that it’s not hard to make, though you might want to tweak the seasonings a bit to suit your taste.

THE MAIN INGREDIENTS:

6 – 8 medium potatoes (about 7 or 8 cups sliced thin)
1 medium onion (2 inches in diameter) (1/2 cup finely chopped)
2 stalks celery with leaves (1/2 to 3/4 cup finely chopped)
4 large eggs

FOR THE DRESSING:
1 cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
1/2 cup sour cream
1 1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
2 tsp. prepared yellow mustard
1 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. dill weed (optional)

FOR FINISHING THE SALAD:
Paprika and parsley for garnish (optional)

PROCEDURE:

Wash and boil the potatoes till done in unsalted water. Boil the eggs four or five minutes, cover them and set the pan aside for another nine or ten minutes. Drain and cool the eggs for ten minutes in ice water, then peel and chop them into about a quarter inch dice.

Clean and chop the onion and celery into an eighth to three-sixteenth-inch dice and set them aside. You should have between one half and three quarters of a cup of each vegetable. Mix the dressing ingredients together in a small bowl while the potatoes and eggs are cooling.

Drain the potatoes when they are tender and allow them to cool for a few minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, peel and slice them thinly into a large mixing bowl. The slicer side of a kitchen grater is the perfect tool for doing this. Pour the dressing over the warm potatoes and mix thoroughly. Then add the chopped eggs, onion and celery and stir well.

Let the salad rest for ten minutes or so, then taste it. This is when you learn how to be a great cook: If the salad seems too dry, add a little more mayonnaise and sour cream. If it is too bland, add a little salt and/or vinegar. Keep track of what you do so you can make this salad again to your exact taste. Put the salad into a serving bowl and sprinkle it with paprika and parsley if you wish.

NOTES: It is important that the potatoes be warm when you add the dressing. The warm potatoes absorb the seasonings from the dressing much better than do cold potatoes. Unlike commercial potato salad made with diced or cubed potatoes, this salad has a smoother texture and lacks the starchy potato flavor you can taste when you bite into a piece of potato.

Pan-Fried Asparagus

“Chuck, I’ve found a real good place for brook trout,” said my father when he picked me up at the bus station in Hayward. The spring semester was over and I was home for a few days before heading back to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for summer school. He was not primarily a trout fisherman, so I knew he had gotten the lead on a hot spot for brookies for my sake.

As we drove home I asked for details. He had gotten the directions from an old friend who fished it during the Great Depression. The friend was older than my father and had not been back to the stream since shortly after World War II. In my few years I had learned to be suspicious of wonderful bass lakes “that nobody fished because you have to carry a canoe in and trout springs that held huge fish because “most fishermen are too lazy to walk in to get to them.”

As an eager teenager I had carried a canoe through some pretty dense woods and waded through my share of swamps surrounding spring holes. While my fishing buddies and I did occasionally catch fish that way, we were never tempted to repeat those expeditions, being mainly just happy to have made it back to the car without getting lost or drowning. When he told me who had revealed this brook trout haven to him, I was even more skeptical: Ole (not his real name) spent most of his time enjoying retirement by telling tall tales in the local taverns.

I was looking forward to spending a few days fishing brown trout on the Namekagon River, but Dad was determined that we should try his friend’s stream on one of those days. Not being a “kiss and tell fisherman,” I will call it Frenchman’s River, with a nod to Robert Traver and his “Frenchman’s Pond.”

It turned out to be nearly a 40-mile drive, a third of it on National Forest Roads graded by men who had been trained to scrape large rocks up to the surface. I was driving, and Dad was giving me directions. We turned off a perfectly good stretch of Forest Road onto a trail that Dad had been told led to some cabins. The alders scraped both sides of my old Desoto, but we got to a turnaround where there were indeed two abandoned cabins.

The river did not look all that promising, but the thick brush on both sides made it clear that it wasn’t being fished very much. The trail crossed the river on a rickety bridge just beyond the cabins. My father announced that he would fish from the bridge, and that I could take my pick of going upstream or down.

When I got back from a half-mile hike that took me to some of the best brook trout fishing I had ever had, Dad was sitting in the car with a can of Leinies and his limit of trout. I cleaned twenty beautiful fish along the river and we headed home with just one stop at a tavern where we acted like any serious brook trout fishermen, explaining that “we caught a few small ones at a culvert where a crick crossed the road.”

When we got home and showed Mom our fish, I think it was the first time she told me that she really liked smaller brook trout.

She fried trout in butter or bacon grease accompanied by boiled potatoes and a green vegetable. My favorite was asparagus, but since we depended on harvesting “wild” asparagus from fence rows and roadside ditches, we often had to make do with peas or beans she had canned the previous summer.

If you ignore the recently created catch-and-release season, trout fishing begins the first Saturday in May and ends on September 30th for most streams in Wisconsin. In northern Wisconsin the asparagus season also starts in May, which may explain why I have always felt that asparagus goes especially well with fried brook trout.

Even canned asparagus makes a good accompaniment, but fresh asparagus boiled or fried until crisp-tender in olive oil and butter is the best. Mom usually boiled asparagus in a little water, but I prefer it fried. Here is how to make enough pan-fried asparagus for four.

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. fresh asparagus
2 T butter
2 T olive oil
3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper

PROCEDURE:

Wash and trim the cut ends of the asparagus. You may need to trim a bit more on some stalks to remove the woody portion. Heat the butter and oil in a frying pan over moderate heat. Add the asparagus and turn to coat the spears with oil. Sprinkle on the salt and grind pepper over the spears. Cook them eight to ten minutes until tender but still crisp.

NOTES: You can also use this recipe to roast the spears. Preheat the oven to 400º and melt the butter. Mix the butter and oil in a glass baking dish and add the asparagus. Sprinkle the spears with salt and pepper and turn them until they are coated evenly with the oil and spices. Roast them for 20 to 25 minutes until tender but still crisp. I usually use sea salt for roasting vegetables, but ordinary iodized salt is okay.