New Potato Salad with Mint and Wholegrain Mustard

The new potatoes arrive at the market in early June, still wearing their papery skins, small enough to hold two in your palm. They smell of earth and rain. This is when the year's best potato salad begins, and it would be a waste to do anything complicated with them.

The whole trick is dressing them while they're still warm from the pan. A hot potato is porous, open, ready to absorb whatever you put on it. A cold potato is closed for business. So you make the dressing first, get it sitting in the bowl, and tip the potatoes in straight from the colander. The mustard and vinegar soak in. The oil coats each one. By the time the mint goes on and the bowl reaches the table, every potato tastes like the dressing was cooked into it rather than poured over the top.

I make this salad all through June and July, when we eat outside more evenings than not. It sits on the table next to whatever is coming off the barbecue, or beside a piece of cold ham, or honestly just on its own with some bread and butter. It doesn't need company, though it's generous with it. Right food, right evening.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: new potatoes, mustard, mint, Saturday. It hasn't changed since, because it doesn't need to.