Home › December › Cream Cold Slaw
Cream Cold Slaw
Cut a firm, crisp, small head of cabbage in quarters. Cut out the stalk and shave in very thin slices crosswise. Cover with ice water and when crisp drain dry. Mix with the following Cream Dressing. Pile pyramid-like in a glass serving dish, and serve very cold. If cabbage is large, use half a head.
A straightforward icebox slaw, dressed at the last minute rather than left to wilt. The only real gap is that the dressing lives on another page.
- The dressing"Cream Dressing" in books of this vintage may be a cooked boiled dressing (egg yolks, vinegar, sugar, mustard, finished with cream) or simply cream sharpened with vinegar and sugar; the recipe's own version is on another page. Either a boiled dressing or a thin sour-cream-and-vinegar dressing will suit the recipe's intent.
- Shave, don't chop"Very thin slices crosswise" means near-translucent ribbons. A mandoline or the 1–2 mm setting on a food processor slicing disc does in seconds what a sharp knife takes patience to do.
- The ice-water soak is the hingeTime in ice water firms the cut edges so the shreds stay crisp under dressing; the recipe's cue is simply "when crisp," which in practice is a matter of some minutes rather than hours.
- Drain dry means drySpin the cabbage in a salad spinner or roll it in a towel. Residual water thins a cream dressing to a puddle in the bottom of the dish.
- Dress at the tableCombine dressing and cabbage shortly before serving; once mixed, a salted dressing steadily draws water out of the cabbage.
- Head sizeA "small head" here is roughly 1½ lb, yielding about 6 cups shredded — four to six servings as a side. Modern supermarket cabbages often run 3 lb or more, hence the note about using half.
- Serving dishThe recipe calls for a glass dish and for the slaw to be served very cold; chill the bowl.
Cold slaw is generally understood as a folk-etymological English reshaping of the Dutch koolsla (kool, cabbage + sla, salad), while the spelling "coleslaw" reflects cole, an old English word for cabbage. Both spellings circulated freely in nineteenth-century books. Its appearance under December in a book of Sunday dinners is practical rather than seasonal whimsy: cabbage was one of the few genuinely crisp things a household could rely on in midwinter, keeping for months in a cellar or root pit when lettuce was out of the question. The insistence on ice water and a very cold serving dish may point to the same period habit o have suggthat a kitchen had ice and knew what to do with it.