Buttermilk and Summer Potato Salad
It can kill a president, or heighten flavors in interesting ways
US President Zachary Taylor went to a July 4th celebration in 1850, consumed copious amounts of fresh cherries and buttermilk, and died five days later. Who knows what might have gotten into the cherries and/or buttermilk in 1850, but it led to the poor man’s death. My bet is on the cherries, as buttermilk at the time was a fermented beverage made from the milk leftover after churning butter. At the time, cream was also fermented before it was churned into butter, so I think that eliminates the buttermilk as a suspect; once a liquid ferments it’s acidity rises and prevents further infection. And would it surprise anyone to find out that cherries grown in or near Washington D.C. were corrupted by one bug or another?
At any rate, buttermilk has long been used in baking. When you add acidic buttermilk to a recipe that also include baking soda, the combination produces carbon dioxide when heated, lightening cakes and soda breads.
I read Wil Readie’s A Line Cook’s Rant About … Cooking, and shook my head, Yes! He’s right about that; there’s something about cooking that brings us closer to nature, not necessarily wilderness type nature, but our own nature. We evolved away from the primates with their large, distended stomachs, required for eating mass amounts of raw food, which prevented upright walking over distance, because we learned to cook over fire; and around the fire pit we probably also learned to talk, to recount the hunt and celebrate it; and in the hunt, we learned organization, strategy and extended our ability to cooperate.
As far as plucking a bird, I admit to having a machine that helps to defeather the animals after I’ve bled them and immersed them in hot water for 60 seconds. Except for the long feathers on the wings, the job is done fairly easily. I don’t actually think there’s a lot to learn here. But the process of raising birds has been a great experience. You have to be on the ball, and never take a day off. The most important thing, other than managing their shelter temperature, food and fresh water intake, is to keep the birds unstressed. Stressed birds will have health issues. They need a healthy place to live without a lot of human interaction. They should never be chased or manhandled; rather, you must appeal to their hunger and thirst to get them to do what’s necessary, like being locked in their shelter for the night.
Our modern life has retreated from the reality of food, and again I agree with Wil that we have also retreated from ourselves. There is humility and reverence that apply to the raising and harvesting of food at the source, from scratch as we say. Sometimes our friends are surprised by the fact that the birds ends up in the freezer in the end, which surprised us. Did they really think we were raising pets? Who raises twenty chicken pets?
And now getting back to the subject at hand - the recipe for buttermilk potato salad dressing, which brings up one other important point about cooking and our human nature and evolution. Buttermilk, like so many of the products on the grocery store shelves, was born of our inherent need to use as much of the products we toiled for as possible. I guess that eons of near death from hunger might have had something to do with it, but it’s certainly more than the result of growing up during the Great Depression. Similarly, I’ll make stock out every part of the defeathered bird that’s not meat, minus of course the innards; but of course we will eat the heart, liver and gizzard.
But I digress - here’s the recipe. This should be enough for four good sized Idaho bakers, or an equivalent amount of Yukon Golds, peeled and boiled in salted water until tender. I normally add an egg for each potato to the pot I’m cooking the potatoes in, and then remove the eggs to cold water after 8 minutes on the low boil:
Onion minced, about a cup
Celery minced, about a cup
4 Eggs, peeled and sliced
1 Cup Mayonnaise
1/2 Cup Sour Cream
3/4 Cup Buttermilk (shake well before pouring)
1 Tablespoon Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Mix the ingredients together in a bowl; its consistency is between the mayo and the buttermilk, and as it sits the celery and onion will release some water, thinning it a bit more, and then add the cubed potatoes. Let it sit on the counter if you’re going to serve it today, or in the refrigerator for a meal tonight or tomorrow. Enjoy, but I would avoid a large bowl of cherries at the same meal!