Classic Potato Salad with Salad Cream

The smell of boiling potatoes is not glamorous. It's starchy and domestic and it fogs up the kitchen window. But it is the smell of something being made for someone, and that counts for more than glamour.

This is the potato salad I grew up eating, or near enough. Not the American sort with mayonnaise and celery, which has its own virtues, but the British one: floury potatoes in a tangy, slightly sweet salad cream that coats each piece in something pale and sharp. Spring onions for bite. White pepper for warmth without the dark specks. It belongs on a blanket at a village fete or on a garden table in the evening light, alongside cold ham and a tomato salad and whatever else the day has offered up. It tastes like summer remembered through a kitchen window.

The salad cream is worth making yourself. Shop-bought will do if you're short on time, and I won't judge you for it, but the homemade version has a brightness and a mustard bite that the bottled sort can't match. It takes five minutes and a small saucepan. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, so adjust the vinegar and mustard to your taste. Some evenings call for more sharpness. Some don't.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: potatoes, salad cream, spring onions, the garden. Saturday. I keep coming back to it because there are few better feelings than carrying a bowl of this outside and watching people help themselves without being asked.