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Cabbage Relish (Chop crisp white cabbage very)
Chop crisp, white cabbage very fine (there should be two cups). Chop one green pepper and one medium-sized Bermuda onion the same. Mix well and season with one teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon black pepper, one teaspoon celery seed and three tablespoons sugar. Dilute one-fourth cup vinegar with two tablespoons cold water; add to relish. Chill and serve in crisp lettuce leaves. 3/4 cup sugar. 1 cup boiling water.
A no-cook cabbage relish, closer to a sharp slaw than to a preserved condiment. It comes together in ten minutes and needs only a little attention to texture and timing.
- The stray last line"3/4 cup sugar. 1 cup boiling water." belongs to neither the method nor the ingredient list above it, and looks like a fragment of another recipe that has ended up here. Ignore it; the relish is sweetened with the three tablespoons of sugar already specified.
- Chop, do not processThe whole character of the dish is fine, dry, crisp shreds. A food processor bruises cabbage and draws out water, leaving a slack relish. Shred by hand with a sharp knife or on the fine side of a mandoline.
- Bermuda onionA flat, mild, sweet onion of the period, sold white, yellow or red. A Vidalia, Walla Walla or any sweet onion stands in; a standard yellow onion will be too aggressive raw against only a quarter cup of vinegar.
- The vinegarCider vinegar is a plausible choice for an American kitchen of this date, and works well here. Vinegar strength was less standardised than today's 5 percent bottles, so taste before adding all the water.
- Salt and standing timeA teaspoon of salt on two cups of cabbage will pull juice within about half an hour. Chill no more than an hour or two for a crisp relish; overnight gives something softer and more pickle-like, which is pleasant but not what is described.
- Celery seedWhole celery seed, not celery salt — the latter would push the seasoning well past the teaspoon of salt called for. Celery seed goes stale and dusty; if the jar has been open a year, replace it.
- Yield and servingRoughly two to three cups, enough for four to six as a side. Served in lettuce cups it reads more as a salad than as a condiment on the plate.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbooks issued by food manufacturers as promotional volumes, organised as a full year of planned menus so a housekeeper never had to decide what Sunday's table would carry. A relish of this kind suits a midwinter menu for a practical reason: cabbage and onions were the vegetables that kept through a northern winter in a cellar or cold store, while lettuce and green peppers were presumably the sort of small luxury that commercial glasshouses and improved rail shipping may have begun to make possible out of season. Uncooked chopped relishes of this kind — cabbage, onion, pepper, sugar and vinegar — are the raw cousins of the boiled and canned chow-chows and piccalillis that filled American pantries in the same decades, and they gave a winter menu the sharpness and crunch that a table of roasted meat and boiled root vegetables otherwise lacked.