The Surprising Story Behind The Famous ‘Shout Hallelujah Potato Salad’

Sometimes the name of a recipe is so intriguing, it can immediately sell you on a dish. We've published lots of them over the years: Million Dollar Spaghetti, Chocolate Delight, the Sock It To Me Cake. And then there’s the queen of them all: Shout Hallelujah Potato Salad. The name is just so good that you don’t need a photo, or even a headnote—you just know you've got to try it. With dozens of five-star reviews, and plenty of comments, it’s our most popular potato salad we’ve ever published.

How The Potato Salad Got Its Fun Name

Surely this recipe had a backstory, and I wanted to find it. After doing a little digging, I traced it back to The Southern Living Community Cookbook written by Sheri Castle, a longtime contributor to the magazine. The headnote says: “When cooks come across a reliable, creative, memorable potato salad that never fails to please the people around their tables, they have reason to rejoice. With this recipe, they might just shout ‘hallelujah!’” The recipe is attributed to Blair Hobbs of Oxford, Mississippi. Hey, wait a minute…I know her!

In addition to being the creator of a famous potato salad, Blair is a writer, a senior lecturer of creative writing at The University of Mississippi, and a fine artist who creates intricate collages with a kaleidoscope of materials ranging from acrylic paint and oil pastels to candy wrappers and pressed flowers. Once one of her pieces catches your eye, it’s easy to become completely absorbed by it because there are so many details to take in.

Finding out that she was the creator of Shout Hallelujah Potato Salad made sense to me in a way, because the recipe is as layered as one of her canvases. It’s also far from traditional, with an ingredient list that includes sweet salad cube pickles, yellow mustard, green bell peppers, rice wine vinegar, celery salt, parsley, hot sauce, red onion, celery, hard-cooked eggs, diced pimientos, lemon juice, and, of course, lots of mayonnaise and potatoes.

I assumed the recipe was an old family one that was handed down and tweaked over the years, but Blair said the creation is entirely her own. “I have no aunts or uncles, and my grandparents, born in the late 1800s, died when I was young, so I don’t have a lot of pass-along recipes,” she explained to me. Her early experience with potato salad was her Colorado-born mother’s “simple and sad version” made with “waxy boiled potatoes and Wishbone Italian dressing.”

""I wanted to create a potato salad recipe so delicious that he’d shout ’hallelujah!’” —Blair Hobbs"

After the birth of her son, Jesse, Blair felt an urge to create her own food memories. “Since I didn’t have many family recipes, I wanted to make one for him. I wanted to create a potato salad recipe so delicious that he’d shout ’hallelujah!’” she said. Potato salad has a rep for being boring and bland, but Blair wanted a version that was full of different textures and tastes. “I grew up on Alabama Presbyterian church-basement potato salads, and I always liked the yellower, mustardy versions as opposed to the mayonnaise-only bases. And as an avid salad eater, I love textural variety,” she said.

The Inspiration Behind The Recipe

And that’s where all of those bright and zingy ingredients come in. “I use the rice wine vinegar because my father-in-law, a Georgia man, loved it, and Tabasco because, like our beloved Duke’s mayonnaise, ’It’s Got Twang,’” she said. “Green bell peppers got a stir out of some folks, but in the summertime, my Alabama neighbors were always throwing garden bell peppers into whatever they could, and I always loved their crisp, vegetal flavor. I think they—and celery—lend respite to the pasty nature of a potato salad mound.”

Once the potato salad became a hit in her family, she entered it into a recipe contest held by the Southern Foodways Alliance, which is based in Oxford. She won, and the recipe was published in the SFA’s Community Cookbook in 2015. [Note: Blair’s husband, John T. Edge, is a founding director of the SFA (and a Southern Living contributor), but she assured me there was no nepotism involved. Personally, I think this potato salad is a winner and speaks for itself.] From there, it spread to our own community cookbook, and then to kitchens across the South and beyond.

Prep Tip

Blair says: "For folks who want to make the recipe for a crowd, I recommend mixing the potato salad with their hands. This is sturdy food, and it will bend your sterling."

What started as a recipe for family and friends turned into something far more meaningful and far-reaching. Now, Blair’s potato salad is a staple at cookouts and potlucks, a recipe people share on Facebook, a dish people know by its name. And because of that ingenious name, it will continue to be passed along for years to come. I can’t think of a better heirloom than that.

Related: 24 Tasty Potato Salad Recipes That Complete Any Menu

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Read the original article on Southern Living.