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Cabbage Relish (Remove the wilted and coarse)
Remove the wilted and coarse outside leaves from one small, solid head of white, new cabbage (Southern), cut off stalk, cut head in quarters, cut out stalk from each quarter and chop cabbage very fine. Add one medium-sized Bermuda onion, finely chopped. Cover with ice water and let stand until crisp. Drain thoroughly and mix with Relish Dressing. Serve in lemon baskets, sprinkle with finely chopped chives, green pepper or parsley. 1 teaspoon mustard. 1/2 teaspoons salt. 1/2 tablespoon flour. 1 tablespoon sugar.
Few grains cayenne.
A cold slaw in the plainest sense — shredded cabbage crisped in ice water and bound with a cooked "relish dressing." The one thing to know before starting is that the ingredient list at the end is not the whole dressing.
- The dressing is incomplete as printedMustard, salt, flour, sugar and cayenne are only the dry seasonings; a cooked "relish dressing" of this period is typically thickened over heat with vinegar and milk or water, butter and often an egg yolk. The wet quantities are not given on this page. Use any standard boiled or cooked salad dressing and treat these five items as its seasoning.
- "1/2 teaspoons salt"The plural suggests a missing figure, possibly 1 1/2 teaspoons, but it is genuinely ambiguous. Salt the finished dressing to taste rather than guessing.
- Ice water, and why it worksTwenty to thirty minutes in ice water is enough for finely chopped cabbage; the cells take up water and turn brittle. Then drain hard and dry it — a wet shred will thin the dressing into a puddle within minutes.
- Chop, don't shredThe recipe says chopped very fine, which gives a spoonable relish rather than a forkful of ribbons. A food processor pulsed in short bursts is fine; run it too long and you get cabbage juice.
- "New cabbage (Southern)"This distinguishes early, tender heads grown in the South and shipped north ahead of the local storage crop. Any loose, light, thin-leaved green cabbage answers; avoid a dense winter head, which is coarser and stronger.
- Bermuda onionA flat, mild, sweet onion once sold by that name (white and red forms were both marketed). A Vidalia, Walla Walla or ordinary sweet white onion is the substitute; a hard yellow storage onion will dominate the dish.
- Lemon basketsHalved lemons hollowed out, the peel sometimes cut into an arching handle. Purely presentational — small ramekins or lettuce cups serve the same purpose.
- Yield and timingOne small head with dressing gives about four to six servings as a side. Dress it no more than an hour ahead; salt and sugar draw water from the cabbage and it slackens quickly.
Boiled or "cooked" salad dressings of this kind — mustard, sugar, a little flour, an egg and vinegar, thickened in a pan — are often said to have served as the American household answer to mayonnaise through much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, in an era when whisking oil into raw yolk by hand was tedious and the result would not keep. Cabbage was the natural partner: cheap, available nearly year-round, and sturdy enough to sit under a sharp dressing. The parenthetical "(Southern)" is a small piece of food-distribution history in itself. By the 1900s rail shipments brought early Southern produce to Northern markets weeks before local gardens came in. The lemon baskets and the sprinkle of chives belong to the same period's enthusiasm for garnish, when a menu was expected to look composed on the table.