Chop a cabbage with 1 large onion and 2 stalks of celery and 2 peppers; season well with salt and sprinkle with pepper. Heat some vinegar; add a teaspoonful of prepared mustard. Then beat the yolks of 2 eggs with a tablespoonful of sugar; add the hot vinegar slowly to the beaten eggs and mix with the cabbage. Serve cold.
A cooked-vinegar slaw in the German style, written in the telegraphic shorthand typical of these day-a-page collections. The quantities for the vinegar and the cabbage itself are left to the cook, so a little judgment is needed.
- The hinge: don't scramble the yolksAdd the hot vinegar to the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking hard, exactly as written. Dumping it in at once curdles the yolks into threads and the dressing is finished.
- Bring the dressing to temperatureAs given, the yolks are warmed but never properly cooked. Return the mixture to the pan and stir over low heat until it thickens and reaches 160F, or start with pasteurized eggs.
- Quantities the recipe omitsA medium head of cabbage, on the order of 2 lb, would suit this amount of onion and celery. Perhaps 1/2 cup vinegar, with the sugar and mustard whisked in; the book does not say which vinegar, though a mild cider vinegar works.
- "2 peppers"Almost certainly green bell peppers, seeded and chopped, rather than chilies; in a salad of this kind the sweet pepper is the likelier reading, especially as the recipe has already called for ground pepper as seasoning.
- Prepared mustardPlain mild yellow mustard, not Dijon or a grainy German mustard. The recipe wants tang and body, not heat.
- Salt the cabbage firstSeason well and let the shredded cabbage stand 20-30 minutes, then squeeze out the liquid before dressing it. Otherwise the water it gives up thins the dressing to nothing in the refrigerator.
- ServingServes six as a side. Better after a few hours chilled, which lets the vinegar soften the cabbage; it keeps two or three days covered.
Krautsalat with a hot vinegar dressing is the standard cabbage salad of southern Germany and Austria, where cooked or warm dressings long predate the mayonnaise-bound coleslaw of American practice — the heat wilts the shreds slightly and carries the sugar and mustard through the leaves. The egg-thickened version here belongs to a family of "boiled dressings" that filled the same role as mayonnaise in ordinary households before commercial jarred mayonnaise became cheap and ubiquitous; they were cheaper, and needed no steady hand with the oil. Its appearance in a book that assigns one dish to each day of the year, marching from a Vienna nut torte to a Russian stewed duck, reflects the early-twentieth-century appetite for cosmopolitan cooking presented in bite-sized daily doses — national identity reduced to a single representative plate, and the German-speaking lands represented, as usual, by cabbage.