Q: What is in potato salad?
Okay. Deep breath. In this potato salad, there are potatoes. Mayonnaise. Paprika, obviously. Two giant celery chunks. One red onion diced. Three hard-boiled eggs. Two ants and three ant fragments. Jorts fringe. Over eight million dormant bacterial colonies per tablespoon of mayonnaise. One black olive. A single blond dog-hair curled around that Yukon Gold cube like a tiny scarf. One of Aunt Verna’s fingernails. Several flakes of Uncle Rick’s cigarette ash. Several droplets of pool water. An entire ecosystem of mayonnaise-adjacent organisms of which scientists are still unaware. Enough sodium to mummify a Civil War drummer boy. A Caucasian Lego head. Several paramecia per deciliter. A solitary bee who died doing exactly what he loved to do most. Microplastics from our cheap lawn chairs.
Q: What makes a good potato salad?
For about eighty years, generations of American women were handed exactly three socially acceptable creative outlets: curtains, casseroles, and whatever “famous” potato salad they could conjure with whatever they dug up from the barren soil. That translucent plastic bowl between the tray of hamburgers and the bag of BBQ potato chips may not look like much to you, but maybe if the patriarchy had allowed Doris from Cheektowaga to become an architect instead of forcing her to channel all artistic ambition into mayonnaise-based magic, you could make the potato salad however you wanted, Ray.
You think Brenda is defensive about her heralded celery-to-egg ratio? You have no idea of the level of defense Brenda is capable of. Because somewhere between Rosie the Riveter and the Melania documentary, Brenda’s goddamn potato salad became her one opportunity to leave a mark on civilization. Where is their Kevin Costner Field of Dreams? Where is their Bruce Springsteen at the county fair, while they bum cigarettes off a carnie in a black Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, with funnel cake powder all over the front?
Q: What’s the biggest mistake people make with potato salad?
It’s never about potato salad. You think your great-aunt gives a fuck about where the potatoes originated or the mustard-to-raisins ratio? No. This is about her mother and about why Aunt Deborah got to take the stuffed pheasant when Pop Pop died. About whose parents stayed married. Potato salad is that baby you’re holding, and it’s that man you fought with this morning, the same one you’re going to make love with tonight. That’s truth. That’s potato salad.
Q: What’s the deal with paprika?
That’s exactly the sort of thing you ask right before you wake up with six feed bags of the Hungarian red dust in your pantry, a LinkedIn profile picture featuring wraparound Oakleys, and a sudden craving for a Bloody Mary from Bar do Armando. Think about it. Suddenly, sometime around 1957, every mayonnaise-based “salad” in America mysteriously acquires heaps of what they call the “Red Whisper.” Why? Flavor? Please. At best, it’s mildly homeopathic. It’s garnish laundering by folks at the highest levels. You shouldn’t even be here. One minute we’re setting up folding tables for a graduation party and the next you’re looking up at a man named László, whose LinkedIn profile picture looks like Keyser Söze.
Q: Who are “they” specifically?
I don’t know yet. The paprika industrial complex. Hungary itself.
Q: The paprika industrial complex?
Open your mind.
Q: Let’s return to potato salad. Mayo or mustard?
Ah. Classic diversion tactic.
Q: It’s literally the topic of this FAQ.
Sure. And Epstein killed himself in a shed behind a Lutheran church potluck because he just happened to looooooove paprika. Please.
Q: Okay, now you’re just saying things.
Are you familiar with the Scoville scale?
Q: That’s peppers.
Exactly.
Q: Paprika isn’t even spicy.
And yet here you are, desperately wanting to free-associate it with peppers and Jeffrey Epstein. Curious.
Q: Why are you like this?
Because I started asking questions after Aunt Carol won “Best Potato Salad” three consecutive years, despite it always containing at least a full quart of warm beige slop juice that rolled around the bottom like the hot, chunky ballast tank of a fishing trawler. Nobody else seemed disturbed by this. That’s when I realized something much bigger was happening.
You ever notice the judges are always the same people? Retired vice principals. Men named Gary who wear ecru New Balance 990v6 sneakers with grass stains. Women who say things like “Some people were just raised right.” Then, one summer, I caught her. Everybody else was outside watching fireworks and just pretending not to hear Uncle Dean sobbing during the drones singing “God Bless the USA.” I walked into the kitchen and saw Carol scraping potato salad from the Wegmans tub into the bowl she’d soon claim as her own.
Q: How long has this potato salad been sitting out?
Define “sitting.”
