Aunt Betty's German Potato Salad

The Recipe

This is her German potato salad, made warm, with bacon and a sweet-tart vinegar dressing. It's simple food, the kind that gets made because someone in the family always wanted it — and now it belongs here, in the Temperance chapter, with all the other recipes worth keeping.

Ingredients

• 3 cups potatoes, peeled and diced
• 4 slices bacon
• 1 small onion, diced
• ¼ cup vinegar
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1½ tablespoons white sugar, or more to taste
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ⅛ teaspoon ground black pepper

Instructions

1. Boil the potatoes whole until fork-tender. Cooking them whole makes the skins easy to peel once cool enough to handle. Peel and dice.
2. While the potatoes cook, fry the bacon until crisp. Remove the bacon and set aside, keeping the grease in the pan.
3. Add the diced onion to the bacon grease and cook until soft.
4. Stir in the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and pepper. Keep stirring until it comes together into a dressing.
5. Break the bacon into pieces and pour everything — bacon and dressing — over the diced potatoes.
6. Mix gently and serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving, makes about 4 servings)

Estimated from the ingredients above — actual values will vary with your potatoes, bacon, and portion sizes.

I think of that little house in Frisco whenever I make this — the quiet, the warmth in the kitchen, and the sense that we were never quite alone in those rooms. Aunt Betty never made a fuss about it. She just kept cooking, kept the door open, and let whatever else was there be there too.