Helen Wilson and potato salad

Throughout college, and most of high school, for that matter, if we were having barbecue, my job was to make the potato salad. At first, it was just to dice the potatoes and the boiled eggs, and my mom would chop the onions and add the pickle relish and salad dressing. I advanced to chopping the onions, and before long, I was doing the whole bowl of salad.

It reached the point where I HATED making potato salad. It didn't matter that everyone loved my mom's recipe and always wanted her to bring the potato salad to any gathering. The fact was that I only sort of liked potato salad myself and would have been perfectly happy without it. I hated cutting up the various ingredients--I was slow and it took me forever. "Why me?" I would wail before my mom asked me oh-so-sweetly to just start it, knowing that once I started it, I'd probably finish it.

Either way, when my mom died, I stopped making potato salad. There was no reason to do so. By then, in 1989 when she died, I'd moved to Texas and was rarely home for those cook-out holidays. In Texas, I never made it for my family, even though I'd acquired more of a taste for it, nor did anyone else ask me to make potato salad.

So alas, yesterday, when out of the blue I decided to make potato salad, it had been more than 20 years since the last time I had done so. My mom's recipe was still stored in the recesses of my brain, although I had to dig a bit. So off I went.

And. . . it was good! Even the youngest BoilerBaby liked it. BB3 was particularly taken by it, mostly foregoing the California cole slaw that she loves and in fact had made in favor of the potato salad. I felt like such a rotten mother, having deprived my kids of something that they very much liked.

I enjoyed it too, maybe because it brought back such fond memories of the mother who raised me and the good times that abounded when she was around. I can't really call it "comfort food" because it was not that to me as a child. Maybe for me, the better term is "mom food."