Home › Salads › Potato Salad (One pint cabbage chopped fine)
Potato Salad (One pint cabbage chopped fine)
One pint cabbage, chopped fine.
Two or three apples, scraped.
One good-sized onion, chopped fine.
One tablespoonful mustard.
Two teaspoonfuls pepper.
One cup melted butter.
Eight eggs (six will do), yolks mashed with butter, whites chopped fine, part mixed with salad and rest spread over the top when made. Add enough vinegar to make a pleasant acid, and salt and sugar to taste. Half pint of cream.
Half pint of sherry.
Half cup of butter.
Three eggs. -Mrs. Maria L. Stuart.
A community-cookbook contribution that has clearly suffered in typesetting: the title says potato, the ingredients say cabbage, and a second short list of ingredients has been tacked on to the end with no instructions attached. Read it as a chopped cabbage and apple salad with a mashed-yolk dressing, and treat the trailing four items as a separate fragment.
- There are no potatoesDespite the heading, nothing in the list is a potato. Either the title belongs to a neighbouring recipe or the compositor set the wrong one; the dish as written is a cabbage slaw.
- The last four items"Half pint of cream. Half pint of sherry. Half cup of butter. Three eggs." appear after the salad is finished and are never used. They look like the beginning of a stray dressing or sauce recipe. Ignore them, or the salad drowns.
- Eggs are hard-boiledThe recipe assumes it without saying so — yolks mashed, whites chopped fine only makes sense for hard-cooked eggs. Boil eight (or six), cool, and separate.
- "Scraped" applesMost likely means scraping the flesh from a halved apple with a spoon or coarse grater, giving a rough pulp rather than dice, though the recipe says no more than "scraped." A box grater does the job; toss with a little of the vinegar to stop browning.
- Mustard means powderMustard probably means powder -- A tablespoonful of mustard in a recipe of this sort most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared table mustard, though both were available. Mash it into the yolks with the butter.
- Two teaspoonfuls of pepper is a lotFor a pint of cabbage that is aggressively hot by modern palates. Start with half a teaspoon and build.
- The butter dressing sets hardA cup of melted butter mashed into egg yolks makes a dressing that congeals as soon as the salad chills. Dress and serve it at room temperature, or substitute a neutral oil if it must sit in the refrigerator.
- Season by taste, deliberatelyVinegar, salt and sugar are all left to the cook. Add vinegar a spoonful at a time and balance with sugar before committing.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of chopped cabbage with apples and six to eight eggs would serve perhaps four to six as a side dish.
Egg-and-butter dressings like this one belong to the era before bottled mayonnaise: the body of the dressing comes from mashed hard-boiled yolk rather than raw yolk and oil, which made it forgiving in a kitchen with no refrigeration and no reliable whisking arm. Cabbage salads of this kind are cousins of American cole slaw, whose name comes from the Dutch koolsla. The attribution to Mrs. Maria L. Stuart marks it as a subscriber recipe, the sort of contribution gathered in quantity for community compilations; such books were often assembled from handwritten cards, which may explain both the wrong title and the orphaned list of cream, sherry, butter and eggs at the end.