Twenty-five years ago, Syracuse.com was launched. It was, and remains, the leading source of information and advertising in Central New York. To celebrate, we’re exploring what makes Syracuse great, and we’ve come up with 25 things that fit the bill.
The seasons. Snow. A full house for an SU basketball game in February. You get the idea.
Every day for 25 days we’ll explore the stuff we brag about and wear as badges of honor as a testament to the folks who make our corner of the world such a great place. We want to know what you think makes Syracuse and the Central New York region great. Tell us here. And you can see our previous stories here.
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If Syracuse was a food, it would be a salt potato
From 1797 to 1917, the Onondaga Salt Reservation, a one-mile wide strip of land that wrapped around the southern half of Onondaga Lake from Liverpool to Geddes, with Syracuse in the middle, produced more than 11.5 million pounds of salt.
That’s enough salt to fill four Carrier Domes.
Syracuse was the salt capital of America. Salt runs through our collective vein like Salina Street runs the length of the city.
But the industry peaked around the Civil War. It ended nearly 100 years ago. The brine wells, solar sheds and wooden vats that once lined either side of Onondaga Lake are almost entirely lost. It’s a history we in Syracuse know, but unless you’ve visited the Salt Museum at Onondaga Lake Park in Liverpool, probably have never seen.
The industry is gone, but the salt lives on. Case in point: the salt potato.
A staple at summer cookouts and clambakes across Central New York, the salt potato’s origin is often attributed to the workers of these salt mines, many of whom were Irish immigrants with a proclivity toward potatoes, known to throw a few spuds into the boiling brine for a quick lunch.
A Syracuse Herald-American headline from 1948 on John J. "Sport" Keefe, a bar owner credited with popularizing salt potatoes in Syracuse in the 1890s.
A 1948 Syracuse Herald-American story credited John J. “Sport” Keefe for creating—or at least popularizing—the salt potato around the 1890s. Keefe owned a saloon on Wolf Street on the North Side of the city, close to the salt yards from where he would fill buckets of brine to boil the spuds. He served the white-crusted potatoes for free at lunch alongside five-cent beers. Patrons would help themselves to the crock filled with five pounds of butter to top their potatoes.
"Syracuse salt boiled potatoes might well be called ‘Potatoes O’Keefe,’” the story read, citing an account of a local historian.
That name didn’t stick, but his recipe did.
Don Cazentre
Hinerwadel's Salt Potatoes.
The ratio of salt to potatoes is eye-opening for the unacquainted. One pound of salt to five pounds of potatoes is common. A bag of Hinerwadel’s salt potatoes—the way most salt potatoes are consumed these days—contain 4 1/4 pounds of potatoes and 12 ounces of salt. Add enough water to cover the potatoes by a couple inches and boil away, accepting of the fact that every surface within range of the boiling pot will soon be caked in a crystalline spray.
Butter is essential, but unlike the salt-to-potato ratio, how much butter goes on top of the potatoes is variable. Ideally the butter should be melted and served alongside and each potato dipped individually before eating, lest the potatoes sit in a pool of melted butter as the steam washes away the thin white salt crust that sticks to the potato’s skin.
A snippet from a 1948 article on an Onondaga County Board of Supervisors clambake that depicts Sylvester “Buck” Easlick (far right), who was proclaimed the "salt potato champ."
Then you have folks like Sylvester “Buck” Easlick, an Onondaga County Sheriff’s deputy who, at a 1949 countywide board of supervisors clambake at Hinerwadel’s Grove in North Syracuse was dubbed the “salt potato champ.” A Post-Standard story about the outing talks of Easlick’s “old two-to-one system." Two pounds of butter for one pound of potatoes. A photograph accompanying the story aptly shows Easlick mid-bite, butter knife in hand.
CNY’s love affair with these fabled “salt marbles” has now expanded to baseball, when the then-Syracuse Chiefs played a lone game as the Syracuse Salt Potatoes in 2017. Following the announcement of the temporary name change, the team received orders for Salt Potatoes merchandise from 39 states. The number of orders went up 14-fold. It proved so popular that the team brought the tater moniker back for four games in 2018. In 2019, the Chiefs became the Mets, but the Salt Potatoes remained. Along the way, the team picked up a renewed rivalry with the Rochester Red Wings, who change its nickname to the “Plates” and don a uniform depicting its own beloved, but often maligned regional food, for possession of the Golden Fork trophy in the “Duel of the Dishes.”
It’s minor league baseball and Upstate New York in finest form.
Syracuse Salt Potatoes vs. Rochester at NBT Bank Stadium on August 5, 2017. The first pitches were thrown with real potatoes. Scott Schild | sschild@syracuse.com SYR
Syracuse has no shortage of regional food specialties: Half-moon cookies, chicken riggies, Hofmann franks and coneys, to name a few. But no food better encapsulates Syracuse and its people like the salt potato.
In her 2010 essay for Central New York Magazine, Barbara Stith argued that salt potatoes should have a place at the dining room table of the world alongside the Buffalo wing—the one Upstate New York food that hit it biggest of all—and lamented, correctly, that no one outside of Upstate New York knows about the salt potato.
That’s because the salt potato is much more than a summation of its admittedly modest parts. It’s the U.S. No. 2 potatoes, a second-tier potato often smaller and with more imperfections than its U.S. No. 1 brethren, that has the proper skin-to-flesh ratio to produce a tender, almost creamy texture for which salt potatoes are prized among those in the know. It’s the brine, saltier than ocean water, unique to the geology of the area that made Syracuse the Salt City.
Gary Walts
Byron Sizemore, (left) Tim Malone, both of Hannibal transfer salt potatoes from the cooking pot into another container at a chicken barbecue hosted by the Hannibal Fire Department. 2002 File Photo.
We’ll defend salt potatoes against those who ask how a dish of three common ingredients became so revered like we’ll defend the city against those who question why anyone would want to live in the snowiest large city in the country that’s also sees some of the least amounts of sunshine.
Salt potatoes will likely never have the fame of the wing. There will never be a restaurant chain called Syracuse Wild Potatoes with two dozen varieties of salt potatoes and locations around the country. Because at the end of the day, it is just potatoes, water and more salt than you’d ever think reasonable.
To love salt potatoes is to love Syracuse. Their high standing in our culinary hierarchy defies conventional logic. But here they are. Here we are too.
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See all of our stories in this series here.
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Jacob Pucci finds the best in food, dining and culture across Central New York. Contact him by email at jpucci@syracuse.com.
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