Home › Vegetables › Warm Slaw
Warm Slaw
Cut the cabbage by shaving down the head in very thin strips with a sharp knife; a hard red cabbage is best for this; then put into a saucepan a piece of butter the size of an egg, two gills of water, three gills of vinegar, a teaspoonful of salt, a little cayenne (and if liked little garlic), cut up very fine; when the whole comes to a boil, pour it over the cabbage and cover closely five or ten minutes. It is then ready for the table.
A hot vinegar dressing poured over raw shredded cabbage — closer to a quick pickle than to the creamy slaw the name now suggests. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: pour hot, then coverThe cabbage is never cooked, only wilted by the boiling dressing trapped under a lid. Use a bowl deep enough that the liquid covers most of the shreds, cover tightly, and leave it the full five to ten minutes so the steam does the work.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of water is 1 cup, three gills of vinegar is 1 1/2 cups — a sharp, vinegar-forward dressing by modern taste. Cider vinegar suits red cabbage; if it seems too aggressive, reduce the vinegar and make up the volume with water rather than adding sugar, which this recipe does not call for.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It emulsifies loosely into the hot vinegar and gives the finished dish its gloss.
- Shaving the head"Shaving down the head" means paring fine ribbons off the head with a sharp knife; in practice most cooks today halve and core the cabbage and slice across the cut face. A mandoline or the slicing disc of a food processor does the same thing faster; knife work gives longer strands.
- Red cabbage and colourThe book's preference for hard red cabbage is partly practical — dense heads shred finely and stay crisp — and partly cosmetic. Acid turns red cabbage a bright magenta, so the vinegar keeps the colour vivid instead of letting it drift blue-grey.
- Garlic"Cut up very fine" attaches to the garlic, not the salt. One or two cloves, minced and boiled with the dressing, is enough; it comes through clearly against so much vinegar.
- Yield and servingA medium head, about 2 pounds, gives six to eight side servings. Serve while still warm, alongside pork, sausage or boiled beef. It keeps several days refrigerated but loses its crispness and becomes, in effect, a pickle.
"Slaw" comes into American English from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, and in nineteenth-century cookbooks it named a whole family of dressed cabbage dishes rather than one. Cold slaw took a boiled or raw dressing over uncooked cabbage; warm or "hot" slaw, as here, was dressed with a hot vinegar-and-butter mixture, and the two appear side by side in household manuals of the period. "Cold slaw" and "coleslaw" were both in use in the nineteenth century, and some writers used the spellings interchangeably. What is striking to a modern reader is the absence of sugar and of any mayonnaise or cream: mayonnaise in this period was something a cook made by hand, and jarred commercial mayonnaise only became widely available in America in the 1910s and after, while the sweet, creamy slaw now assumed by the word is largely a twentieth-century development. This version belongs to an older, sharper tradition, closer to the hot bacon-dressing salads of German and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, where the dressing's heat is the only cooking the vegetable gets.