German, French; potato, pohtahtoh

I'm not a recipe follower though I do love to cook.  In recent years, with the ease of access to recipes of all kinds on the internet, I have taken to looking at 2 or 3 recipes online before I cook and then following none of them.  However, I find it grounding in my process and looking at those recipes certainly gives me ideas. 

Imagine my surprise when I decided to make a dish I had not made in years and googled "German Potato Salad".  I'm like, what's with the bacon everywhere?  This is not how Mama made it!  It slowly dawned on me that I had never before actually looked up a recipe for Potato Salad and had just been winging it by imitating my childhood memories.  Then, I realized in a fit of deep intellectual insight: "Hey, my Mom is actually French, not German so...." and then when I googled "French potato salad" I started seeing dishes that looked much more like what I was expecting.  Anyway, I promptly ignored all those "French Potato Salad" recipes and did my thing:

So, I have come to realize that Americans like to call any cold potato salad that is not mayonnaise based as "German".  But of course, every region in the world has their own way of flavoring up some boiled potatoes! (apparently, just within Germany the regional differences are so big it doesn't really make sense to glom it all together as one dish). 

I have a strong memory of when I first came to think of 'my' dish as "German Potato Salad" (growing up, Mom did not name the dishes; She served them and then I ate them and that was that). It was actually in grad school.  A bunch of us CMU physics grad student nerds were having a pot luck dinner at someone's house.  (Elaine's house, Shadyside, Pittsburgh circa 1993?)  I made this salad for some reason.  One guy (Eldon?) LOVED it and I can still picture him pointing at his second serving emphatically and saying "This is really good German Potato Salad, Ken!"  He said it in an authoritative way like someone who really knows their German potato salads so I thought "Hmm, that must be what that dish is called."