As folks are gearing up for the Fourth of July holiday, picnics, barbeques and festivals are popping up and there is one local food that many people will be serving - the Syracuse salt potato.
You know it’s summer in central New York when the salt potatoes are out on the shelves. Norm Giunta, owner of Giunta’s Produce knows this all too well.
“June, July and August are the three biggest months for sales,” Giunta said. “It's a warm weather item.”
Usually sold in five pound bags, golden potatoes are bagged with over a cup of salt to create the perfect boiling brine. Giunta said the Fourth of July weekend sees the biggest uptick in salt potato sales.
But how did the dish become such a beloved staple?
Onondaga Historical Association Director Bob Searing said it’s a story of immigrant struggle, local industry and a lot of butter.
“It's more than a potato, right? It's more than a salty potato,” Searing said "It's a representation of the immigrant story of the industry, right. Of the struggle to make it, all wrapped up in this beautiful, briny bite of deliciousness.”
In the mid-1800s Syracuse salt production was cranking out around two million bushels of salt annually, producing almost all of the salt used in the United States at that time. Salt workers, made up of mostly Irish, German and other immigrants, worked to boil off the salt from the salt springs on the edges of Onondaga Lake. The brine they were creating was the perfect thing for a hearty lunch.
The workers would toss potatoes into the boiling brine and pop them out, adding in another local industry’s product - butter- for their mid-day meal. Searing said the tradition of today was born out of the immigrant struggle.
“When these potatoes were invented, when this dish was invented, it was not some, you know, bougie thing or whatever it was,” Searing said. “It was like people that had very little, probably with like scrap potatoes that weren't big enough to sell in the shop or whatever. And they were just tiny little ones, and they're just like throwing them in there. So like, even that, like a good salt potato is still a callback to some sort of hardscrabble existence.”
Norm Giunta of Giunta’s Produce said the potatoes back then would have been the “number two’s.” Now, quality checks can play a larger role.
“Back in the day when they started potatoes. That's what they did. They were they were the calls. They were the number two. Is that the the salt miners would eat with the salt. They were the number two potatoes,” Giunta said. “But now it's turned into an industry.”
The first record of salt potatoes being commercially sold dates back to the 1880’s on Syracuse’s northside, served hot and covered in melted butter.
Searing says the dish is a crazy, perfect opportunity to talk about the history of Syracuse and Onondaga County, taking things all the way back to when the Haudenosaunee Confederacy first showed Europeans the salt springs.
“So it goes all the way back to the roots of this community and I think that there aren't very many things that you can say that about, and certainly not things that can get together, you know, family and friends and enjoy it, you know, as well as much as you can with the salt potato and a barbecue,” Searing said.
Searing said the next time you bite into a salt potato you’re also taking a bite out of some rich central New York history.
