Ensaladilla Rusa Andaluza

Ensaladilla rusa, as Andalucía serves it on a bar counter and at home, is a cold potato-and-tuna salad bound with mayonnaise, not a sweet, loose pile of everything in the fridge. Potato, carrot, peas, tuna, egg, and a good mayonnaise. A few olives if that is how your house does it. Nothing clever. The best ones look plain until the fork goes in.

The method that decides it is the potato. Boil the potatoes whole, in their skins, until just tender, then peel and cut them while still warm. Cut raw potato into cubes before boiling and it drinks water like a sponge, then the mayonnaise turns slack and the salad tastes tired. Whole potatoes stay firm and waxy, with enough body to hold the tuna and the dressing without becoming paste.

If you are far from Spain, no hace falta haber pisado España. Use a waxy potato, good olive-oil-packed tuna, and pasteurized egg for the mayonnaise if raw egg worries you. Spanish canned ventresca is lovely, but ordinary good tuna in olive oil is the real kitchen answer, not a luxury demand. If you must buy mayonnaise, choose a plain one and sharpen it with a little olive oil and sherry vinegar. It changes the dish, yes, but it still feeds people well.

Chill it long enough for the salad to settle, then bring it out ten minutes before eating so the potato tastes of itself again. In my Margin for this one I wrote only this: do not drown it. The mayonnaise is there to bind, not bury. Siempre sale, si lo sigues.