Delia Smith’s new potato salad with mint and chives starts with new potatoes, cooked in their skins with mint sprigs and dressed warm in a garlic and mustard vinaigrette. Chopped mint, parsley, chives and spring onions go in once it has cooled, so allow about 1 hour 10 minutes for 4 to 6 people.
It’s from her Complete Cookery Course, and she rates this one as “so good it’s almost best to eat it on its own”. Watch for one step in the method, where the cooked potatoes are cut up roughly in the bowl before the vinaigrette goes on. Those broken edges take in far more of it than whole potatoes would.
The herbs wait until the potatoes have cooled, which keeps the mint and chives bright rather than limp. Delia also keeps most of the green tops on spring onions for a salad. What you get is soft, earthy potatoes with a sharp mustard tang, cool mint and a little bite of onion running through.
Delia Smith’s New Potato Salad with Mint and Chives
The new potato salad from Delia’s Complete Cookery Course (1992), page 448, dressed with her own pestle-and-mortar vinaigrette from page 437. The ingredients are simple: unscraped new potatoes, mustard powder, olive oil, three herbs and eight spring onions.
4
servings45
minutes25
minutes350
kcalIngredients
- For the salad:
900g (2lb) small new potatoes
2 sprigs mint, for the pan
3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 tablespoons snipped chives
8 medium spring onions, very finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper
- For the vinaigrette:
1 level teaspoon salt, ideally crushed rock salt
½ to 1 clove garlic, peeled
1 rounded teaspoon mustard powder
1 tablespoon wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar
freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons olive oil
Directions
- Vinaigrette: Pound the salt to a powder in a pestle and mortar, add the garlic and keep pounding until it turns into a smooth paste. Work in the mustard powder, vinegar and a few twists of pepper until the salt has dissolved, then add the olive oil and pour it all into a screw-top jar.
- Wash: Rinse the potatoes under the cold tap, leaving the skins on and unscraped.
- Simmer: Put them in a medium saucepan with a little salt and the 2 mint sprigs, then pour over enough boiling water to come about half-way up. Cover with a tight-fitting lid and simmer gently for 20 to 25 minutes.
- Test: Push a skewer into the biggest potato. It should slide in easily while the potato still feels firm, so stop there, as overcooked new potatoes turn watery and mushy.
- Dress: Drain them in a colander, lift out the mint sprigs and tip the potatoes into a salad bowl. Chop them roughly with a knife, give the jar a hard shake and pour the vinaigrette over while they’re still warm, mixing well.
- Finish: Leave the potatoes to cool for about 30 minutes, then stir in the herbs and the spring onions. Taste, add salt and pepper as needed, and keep the salad somewhere cool until you serve it.
Notes
- Snip the chives with kitchen scissors rather than chopping them, which is how Delia prepares them.
- Without a pestle and mortar, crush the garlic and salt together on a board with the flat of a large knife.
- If the salad has to wait more than 2 hours, cover it and keep it in the fridge, then eat it within 2 days, which is my own limit.
FAQs
Which mint should I use?
Spearmint, the everyday garden mint sold in packs and pots. Delia’s Complete Cookery Course says it’s the only mint she still grows, and it’s the one she uses with new potatoes.
Dried mint is the one thing to avoid, as she finds it loses all its flavour and tastes musty. In winter I’d buy a growing pot from the herb shelf, which easily gives you the 3 tablespoons plus the sprigs.
What can I use instead of chives?
Welsh onion, a leafy onion that looks like spring onion tops and keeps growing all winter. Delia finds it a little stronger than chives but fine in any recipe that uses them, so chop it finely and I’d use a little less.
Chives themselves are in season from April to October, and dried ones don’t work at all in her view. To freeze your own for winter, blanch them in a sieve with boiling water, cool them under the cold tap, then dry and bag them.
Why do the potatoes only sit half in the water?
So the top layer cooks in steam under the tight lid. Delia’s vegetable chapter in the same book explains that low water lets the smallest potatoes cook in the steam, so they’re ready with the bigger ones.
For plain new potatoes she also sets the largest on the base of the pan and the small ones on top, which helps here too if yours are mixed sizes. She lets the water come no more than three-quarters of the way up for those, while this salad keeps it to about half-way.
Which vinegar goes in the vinaigrette?
Wine vinegar, or balsamic if you prefer it. Balsamic came in with the 1992 edition of the Complete Cookery Course, while the first edition in 1983 offered cider vinegar as the alternative.
Whichever you choose, keep to 1 tablespoon for the 6 tablespoons of oil, since Delia counts too much vinegar as the most common fault in a dressing. She thinks adding sugar to cover it is worse still, and while lemon juice can replace the vinegar, on the whole she prefers wine vinegar.
How is this different from Delia’s warm potato salad?
Mainly the dressing and the herbs. Her warm potato salad from the Summer Collection gets lemon juice, zest and grain mustard, while this one has mustard powder, vinegar, chopped mint and parsley.
If you’d rather have the same three herbs on hot potatoes, the Complete Cookery Course also has buttered new potatoes with parsley, mint and chives for 4. The herbs are mixed into 40g (1½oz) of butter and swirled through the drained potatoes in the pan with the lid on.
