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Cabbage Salad
Two tablespoonfuls of flour, one raw egg, one cup of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls butter, one and a half teaspoonfuls of mustard, one teaspoon black pepper, same of salt. Mix flour and butter, add egg and above ingredients; cook until thick; chop cabbage fine; add the dressing when cold; mix well; add one cup of sweet cream.
This is a boiled dressing — a cooked vinegar-and-egg sauce that served as mayonnaise before jarred mayonnaise was common. The cabbage is raw; only the dressing is cooked.
- Cook it gently, and never let it boil hardThe egg is the thickener alongside the flour. Cook over low heat or a double boiler, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon; a rolling boil will scramble the egg and leave the dressing grainy. It thickens further as it cools.
- "Mustard" means dry mustard"Mustard" most likely means dry mustard -- In books of this period an unqualified spoonful of mustard is usually powdered mustard rather than prepared, though the recipe does not say. A teaspoon and a half of dry mustard is assertive for a cup of vinegar.
- The pepper and salt are generousA full teaspoon of black pepper in a cooked base of roughly a cup and a half (nearer two and a half cups once the cream is stirred in) reads hot to modern palates. Start with half and adjust.
- Vinegar strengthHome-made cider vinegar varied in strength and could be rougher than the standardised 5 percent bottled vinegar sold now. If the dressing tastes harsh, cut the cup of vinegar with a few tablespoons of water; note that the recipe contains no sugar.
- "Sweet cream"Sweet cream simply means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream or buttermilk many kitchens had on hand. Any pouring cream works; heavy cream gives the richest result.
- Order of assemblyThe dressing must be fully cold before it meets the cabbage, as the recipe directs, or the shreds wilt and weep. Chop the cabbage fine, dress it, then stir in the cream last, as written.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe specifies no quantity of cabbage; the dressing would suit roughly a medium head. Dressed slaw of this kind is best within a few hours; the salt draws water from the cabbage and thins the sauce overnight.
Boiled dressing was a common American salad sauce of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and cabbage was a frequent partner — cheap, storable through winter, and firm enough to stand up to a thick, sharp coating. Cooked dressings like this one used flour and an egg in place of oil, and they persisted in household manuals alongside French oil-and-vinegar dressings. Commercial mayonnaise, which would eventually displace dressings like this from the slaw bowl, did not become a widely sold jarred product until the 1910s and 1920s.