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To Prepare Slaw
One-half head of good cabbage, chopped finely, the yolks of two eggs, beat and put in a little vinegar, salt and pepper to taste; boil thick and pour over the slaw.
A boiled dressing rather than a mayonnaise: two yolks thickened over heat with vinegar, poured hot over shredded raw cabbage. The recipe assumes you know how far to take the eggs, which is the whole difficulty.
- The hinge: thicken, do not scrambleYolks and vinegar set at around 160-170F, well below a boil. Despite the word "boil," work over low heat or a bowl set on simmering water and stir constantly until the mixture coats a spoon, then take it off at once. A true rolling boil will curdle it into sweet-sour scrambled egg.
- "A little vinegar" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no measure. For two yolks, something in the range of a quarter cup of cider vinegar is workable, thinned with an equal amount of water if your vinegar is sharp. Nineteenth-century household vinegar was inconsistent in strength; modern bottled vinegar is typically around 5 percent acidity and will likely taste harsher than the book expects.
- Half a head of cabbageRoughly 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed, giving about 6 cups shredded and four to six side servings. "Chopped finely" here means shredded thin, not minced — cut the half head into quarters, core it, and slice crosswise as narrowly as you can.
- What the dressing lacksThere is no fat and no sugar, so this is a bracingly sharp slaw by current taste. A tablespoon of butter stirred in off the heat, or a spoonful of sugar dissolved with the vinegar, both have period precedent in other boiled-dressing recipes and will not misrepresent the dish.
- Quantity of dressingTwo yolks make a scant half cup of sauce, which is a light coating for that much cabbage rather than a soaking. If you want a wetter slaw, scale the dressing rather than adding raw vinegar at the end.
- Hot over coldPouring the hot dressing over raw cabbage wilts it slightly and lets it absorb the seasoning. Toss immediately, then chill; the slaw is better after an hour and holds a day in the refrigerator, though it loosens as the cabbage weeps.
Boiled dressing of this kind — egg yolks tightened with vinegar over heat — was a common American salad sauce through the nineteenth century, alongside mayonnaise-type dressings, and it survived in home cookbooks long after commercial mayonnaise arrived, partly because it used no oil, then a comparatively expensive pantry item. The name is generally traced to the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, carried into American English through New York and the Dutch settlement there; "cold slaw" and "hot slaw" both appear in period books, the former a folk reworking of the first syllable, with "hot slaw" then formed by analogy. Cabbage was a winter keeper, cheap and available when little else green was, and a dish like this one was a way of getting something fresh-tasting onto the table in February.