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Cabbage Dressing
Two small teaspoonfuls of mustard.
Two teaspoonfuls flour.
Piece of butter size of an egg.
Vinegar, salt and pepper. -Mrs. B. B. V.
When thoroughly mixed, pour over the cabbage when hot. One raw egg.
This is a boiled dressing in shorthand: the contributor assumed her reader already knew the method and only listed what went in. The quantities of vinegar and the handling of the egg are the two things you have to supply yourself.
- The hinge: the eggWhisk the raw egg with a ladle of the hot vinegar mixture first, then return it to the pan over low heat. Added straight to a boiling pan it scrambles, and the dressing turns grainy instead of thick.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure of about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. It is not an exact figure and a little either way will not hurt the dressing.
- Mustard means powderTwo teaspoons of dry English mustard, not prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard is already thinned with vinegar and will leave the dressing loose and much milder.
- Vinegar, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. For 2 oz butter and 2 teaspoons flour, roughly 1/2 cup of cider vinegar makes a pourable dressing; less gives something closer to a sauce. Cider or white wine vinegar suits cabbage better than distilled.
- Reconstructing the methodMelt the butter, stir in the flour and mustard to a smooth paste, add the vinegar gradually and cook until it thickens, then temper in the egg and season. Hold it at a bare simmer for a minute or two so the egg sets and the flour loses its raw taste.
- Cabbage served hot'Pour over the cabbage when hot' is ambiguous: 'hot' may describe the dressing, the cabbage, or both. Either way this is a wilted slaw rather than a cold salad. Shred the cabbage fine; if you heat it, blanch or steam it briefly so it is hot and still crisp, and drain it well, since standing water thins the dressing.
- YieldAbout a cup of dressing on the quantities suggested above, enough for a small head of cabbage, serving four to six as a side.
Boiled or cooked dressings like this one were the everyday American salad dressing through the nineteenth century, well before jarred mayonnaise reached home kitchens: butter, flour, vinegar, dry mustard and an egg gave a tangy sauce without the fuss of emulsifying oil by hand. Poured over hot shredded cabbage it produces the wilted slaw associated particularly with Pennsylvania German and Midwestern tables, where a hot vinegar dressing was also used on lettuce, dandelion greens and potatoes. The attribution to "Mrs. B. B. V." suggests a contributed recipe, a form common in community or church cookbooks assembled from neighbours' cards, which may also explain why the instructions are so compressed.