Tater Salad

Growing up in Australia my family continued the tradition of Christmas dinner but not Thanksgiving. The Australians do not have a Thanksgiving Day so Christmas was the one day a year where we had the traditional turkey dinner. There was one huge difference though at Christmas time in Australia and that is it is in the dead heat of summer. So because of the intense heat my mother had added to the traditional turkey, stuffing, ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, and sweet potatoes a rather odd dish to cool it down…….potato salad.

Of course growing up this was not weird to me because it was our tradition. I thought that every American family had potato salad with Christmas dinner. Only after I got married to an American and for the first time had a real American traditional Christmas meal did I realize that potato salad was not on the menu. I felt like it was not complete without the potato salad and when I brought up the missing potato salad at the table I was confronted with looks of are you crazy? I was shocked that not every American was eating potato salad on Christmas day.

When we got back home the very next day I went out and bought all of the ingredients to make a traditional Christmas meal. I bought a turkey, stuffing, ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, and sweet potatoes. I also bought all the ingredients for potato salad and I made it just the way my mother made it all those years in Australia. I had to have a Christmas dinner the way that I was used to and not until I had ALL the side dishes did it feel like Christmas.

Potato salad was not just made for Christmas when I was growing up it also accompanied any meal that was a celebration of a special event in the lives of someone in the family. Whether it was some ones birthday party or an anniversary or anything that someone deemed worthy of celebrating we would get together as a family with at least thirty family members and sit down to eat the main meal that always included the original recipe, my mothers recipe, of potato salad.

This potato salad became a star in our community and my mother was asked to make it for church functions or get togethers and it was always the first dish to be consumed. People were always asking for the recipe which my mother kept top secret. She did pass it onto her daughter and daughter-in-laws with the strict instruction that the recipe never be revealed to the public. That was twenty years ago and no one has given the secret recipe to anyone outside of the family to this day. Sorry, I cannot reveal it here either on orders of the queen or I will be beheaded!