Recipe: Penne Salad with Onion and Relish
Pamela Osborne shows us how to make this deli favorite at home, with no waiting in line or pre-ordering required.
In the beginning, there was the deli. Back in the old neighborhood days, they were usually Jewish or Italian, places where you could get a sandwich and a few things to go with it. In those simpler times there were also simple salads: coleslaw, pasta, potato, tuna, chicken, egg. Basically, not much that you couldn’t make at home, except that, aside from the happy dance moment of not having to do that, there was usually something just a little bit different about the salads from a good deli.
After a while, take-out became more and more elaborate, along the lines of the Silver Palate and its many imitators. Good, most of the time, and, by the way, way more expensive. I think, these inflationary days, spending a lot when you drop by on your way to a picnic or the beach isn’t in the cards so much. I would bet that the traditional standbys are what most people really want anyway.
I used to know the owners of a big and successful take-out shop in Westchester, and they were really on top of how to run their business. Good food, just that much better than what you’d find in other places, and not too difficult or expensive for them to produce. They made a pasta salad that I eventually figured out how to make on my own, not that that was hard to do — the ingredients were plain to see, it was just the proportions that needed figuring out.
I doubt that the shop is still there, it’s been a few decades and we moved away long ago. But the recipe lives on at my house, and I think you’ll be glad to give it a home in yours, too. It’s a little bit different, and really good. People could buy it and feel it was all a fair exchange. And they did: it was regularly and reliably sold out every day by noon.
Penne Salad with Onion and Relish
Serves around eight, depending on what else is on the table
One pound of penne rigate, cooked, drained, and allowed to cool for about 15 or 20 minutes.
Mix together:
- 1 cup Hellman’s regular mayonnaise
- 1 cup full fat sour cream
- 1 crushed garlic clove
- About 1/2 cup finely minced red onion, or less or more to taste
- About 6 forkfuls of pickle relish: dip a fork into the jar and bring it up, with its juice. I like Heinz India Relish, which is sometimes hard to find these days, but any good relish will be fine. Again, more or less, according to your taste
- Salt and pepper. Not too much, as the mayonnaise is salted. You can have S and P on the table for people who want more.
When the penne has cooled from hot to just medium warm, put it in a bowl and, with your clean and washed hand, mix in everything else, which should already be combined and waiting for its moment. If you try to mix this with anything but your hand, the pasta will break apart. Also, you are not rinsing the penne, and it will stick together; you can gently pry it apart with your fingers. (You can wear a disposable glove if you want to, but rinse the glove off, in case it’s powdered.) This will look like it’s swimming in dressing. Refrigerate it for a few hours or overnight, and all that will be well absorbed.
The original salad had a few tablespoons of minced green pepper, but I don’t add that. You could, though, or red pepper, for color, up to you. I put some chopped chives on this for the photograph, but ordinarily I wouldn’t bother with that. And I probably shouldn’t have bothered here, since it obscures the onion and relish. Good stuff, you’ll like it.
