Joe Yonan and His Mother’s Potato Salad Recipe

Growing up as the youngest of eight, Joe Yonan remembers his mom’s cooking for how sensible it was. Because they lived in West Texas and his mother was originally from Indiana, he calls her food a “classic Midwest approach with popular Texas ingredients.” There was a Texas salad that called for a head of lettuce, a can of beans, a bag of Fritos, a block of cheddar cheese, and a bottle of Catalina French dressing. “She was raising all these kids so it was largely about efficiency,” he says. “She had a tight repertoire.”

Having spent nearly 20 years as the food and dining editor of The Washington Post, Yonan became interested in his mother’s recipes when he started writing about food professionally. His eldest sister, Teri (there’s a 25-year difference between them), taught him most of what he knows about Southern cooking and helped him uncover some of their family favorites. “She sent me some things of our mom’s, and a lot of them were pages ripped out of cookbooks with her notes on them,” he says. The dish he remembered most, though, was his mom’s potato salad—the potatoes were always just the right texture and he loved that there was an added crunch of cucumber.

“[Teri] has my mother’s original copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook with the gingham cover that’s tattered and the binding is in pieces,” he recalls. Teri found the potato salad recipe and wrote it out for him, complete with an inscription—he’s held onto and cooked from it for decades.

Yonan has developed countless of his own recipes for both the newspaper and his many cookbooks (his latest, Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking, came out in 2024), an exacting job that requires precise measurements. He appreciates that this recipe calls for exactly one cup of chopped celery but stays looser with six potatoes and one cucumber. What he loves most? “There’s no quantity for the mayonnaise. I’m a mayonnaise lover but even for me, I’m like, whoa,” he says with a laugh. “How much is the right amount of mayonnaise?”

More than most, Yonan knows the power of a recipe that transcends the page. “It still surprises me when someone tells me that one of my recipes has become a staple for them,” he says. For him, the magic here is the page itself, thanks to his sister’s handwriting: the perfect crisp lines of the recipe, followed by what he calls her “astonishingly beautiful” cursive script and signature sign-off at the bottom: Love you madly. It keeps him tethered to both his mother and to Teri. “That’s still how she ends every conversation,” he says.

Get the Recipe

Adapted from Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook

Mother's Potato Salad

yields

Serves 8

ingredients

• 6 potatoes, cooked in jackets (4 cups cubed)
  

• 1 onion, chopped
  

• 3 hard-cooked eggs, sliced 1 cup chopped celery
  

• 1 cucumber, diced
  

• 11⁄2 teaspoons salt
  

• 1⁄4 teaspoon paprika
  

• 1⁄4 cup French dressing (Yonan
  

• recommends Catalina)
  

• Mayonnaise

steps

1. Combine ingredients except dressings. Chill and marinate in French dressing, 4 to 6 hours. Just before serving, add mayonnaise and mix carefully. If desired, add 1 teaspoon celery seed or 1 cup grated carrot.

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