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Nonna's Italian Potato Salad - Naturally Gluten, Egg, and Dairy Free

carlawright82
Jan 26, 2015
3 min read

Nonna's Italian Potato Salad

This is a family favourite. You will pretty much always find this potato salad at on one of our family barbeques.

My Grandparents moved to Australia in the 1950’s and my mum was born here in Perth. Nonna (Italian for Grandma) continued to make many of foods she had learned to make growing up in Italy. Many of the dishes from the area where my grandparents came from are vegetarian or do not have a lot of meat it them. Traditionally many parts of southern Italy were quite poor and people got by growing their own fruits and vegetables, selling or trading the surplus with other families.

Where my family is from they eat a lot of beans, tomatoes, olive oil, eggs and other things that could easily be grown to feed a large family. Meat was very expensive and people didn’t have a lot of land to graze animals. Meat was a luxury when it was available, especially as many families had lots of children (In my Nonna’s family there were 7 children) and only very small portions were added to dishes to add a bit of flavour. It was definitely not served as a main meal.

Pasta and Pizza were served as main meals as the ingredients could be grown or bought cheaply. Pizza was essentially bread dough with a couple of overripe tomatoes squashed on the top and maybe some fresh basil for some flavour. Pasta was a tomato sauce

Many of the foods served in Italian restaurants today as fancy dishes today, were originally things people ate, just to get by when there was little other food. Things like Brushcetta: I watched a cooking show recently where they said it should be made with fresh bread. That’s not how it was back in Italy many years ago. If you were lucky enough to have old bread and tomatoes, olive oil, and some basil, garlic and maybe some and salt - hey kids we have dinner tonight. Another common thing was to get old bread cut into slices and ladle a spoonful of tomato pasta sauce over it, this also served as a main meal.

Italians don’t refer to tomato pasta sauce as Bolognese either, and I was told in Italy that Bolognese is not in fact from Bologna, it’s just made up. Everywhere in Italy makes Tomato Pasta sauce in one form or another and it’s referred to as Sugo Rosso, which means red sauce. Traditionally southern Italians don’t consume much dairy either, southern Italians did not drink milk or use cream in their cooking, and this is something that was done in the North of Italy, where they have more room to graze cows. In the south even certain cheeses, such as Pecorino, were made from sheep milk. White (Bianco) Pasta in the south is Garlic cooked in olive oil and poured over the pasta.

The Potato salad recipe originally had beans in it too, but Nonna stopped putting them in and I don’t remember ever eating it that way. It’s hard to give exact Measurements as most Nonna’s, including mine, don’t measure exactly. It’s important to taste as you go to make sure it tastes good, so this recipe is quite rough.