Gnarly Potato Salad

Is there anything more universally binding and delicious than potato salad?

For my family, traveling around from coast to coast, up and down from North to South, recipes from home are the one thing that doesn’t get broken in moving.

Crystal lamps? Sure. The random plate that Mom got for Christmas one year when grapes were her thing? Absolutely. A thousand pieces.

Yet the one thing that fed our little family, a small army of five every summer for every barbecue, filled with so much mayonnaise to stop your heart was Grandma’s legendary Gnarly Potato Salad.

Yes yes, absolutely gnarly.

Every things was chunked and chopped so thick, chewing it took a few minutes. It was the first thing to get devoured and everything scraped out of the bowl. Making it was a family activity as only an army of poor knife skills could make it as chunky and delicious as it was. There was nothing skimpy about it.

Each part of our family had a bit of variation to it. Ours, we started adding cucumbers when my green-thumbed Dad starting growing them by the bushel and we were running out of ideas of how to use them all.

Others were more traditional, sticking to the recipe of adding celery into it to give it the crunch. Some add more mustard, some added less.

No matter what variation, it was always gone by the time the bowl was put out and the buffet started.

My childhood was always watching Dad do the vast majority of the cooking and the barbecuing during the summer. Every time someone got voluntold to do some kind of prep work. For me I always got told to do the potatoes, peeling and cutting until my fingers were pruned.

Sometimes someone got the short straw and had to do the eggs that always left the more permanent stink on your fingers next to the onions themselves.

Over forty years go, Dad was in our position as the baby of our patchwork of Aunts and Uncles. While most of his siblings were older, he was with Grandma in the kitchen learning how to make the classics. Even when I was in my teens, I took on that role standing with her as we mushed the meat with some egg for meatballs or meatloaf or learning how to make the perfect mashed potatoes.

A lesson I wish I had kept as I had tried to make them on my own one year and they ended more like gnarly mashed potatoes instead. Oh the embarrassment!

Not every recipe was a successs. I still remember the tart taste of the key lime pie that she had clipped from her household magazines she had been waiting to try as Grandpa’s diet was safe and full of pizza from a little place down the mountain. One bite and I could nearly feel my lips curl back to the backs of my teeth. Not all sweet things are without flaw.

The last great gathering was a few years after both grandparents had passed. The house they had bought ages ago was now remodeled and modern. No more floral farmhouse and creepy doll hallway. Family came and went, moving further south to be closer to the work or closer to family.

Yet it was there. Sitting next to the Watergate Salad (that’s not really a salad) in a big metal bowl or Tupperware. Everyone knew the taste, everywhere knew to find it. It sat with with burgers and hot dogs, mingled like a giant majestic lumpy feast in the middle of meat, meat and more meat.

It’s home. It’s the one thing we can move anywhere in the world and so long as there was a bowl, potatoes, eggs and something crunchy, home was there. Now that I’m married, it’s in my home in all of its gnarly glory.

Thanks Grandma. Thanks Dad.