Hot Slaw
Shave one-half head white cabbage as fine as possible, using a sharp knife. Serve with a dressing made of yolks of two eggs slightly beaten; add one-fourth cup each of hot water and hot vinegar, slowly beating constantly, four tablespoons butter, a few drops onion juice, one-half teaspoon salt, and sift in one-half teaspoon ground mustard and one-eighth teaspoon pepper. Stir this mixture over hot water until it thickens to the consistency of cream; add to cabbage; mix well; place on range, stirring constantly until mixture is heated throughout. Two tablespoons of sugar may be added.
A cooked boiled-dressing slaw of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise. The dressing is a thin vinegar custard, and it behaves like one.
- The hinge: gentle heat"Stir this mixture over hot water" means a double boiler, and the water should be steaming rather than boiling hard. Egg yolks in an acidic mixture will set into curds above roughly 180F, and once they break the dressing cannot be brought back.
- "Place on range"After the dressing is combined with the cabbage, this means the lowest possible burner setting, just long enough to warm through. The cabbage should still have snap; a few minutes is plenty.
- Shaving the cabbageAs fine as possible is the point here, since the hot dressing has to coat and slightly wilt the shreds. A mandoline or the thin slicing blade of a food processor does this faster than a knife, though a knife gives longer strands.
- Onion juicePeriod cookbooks got this by cutting an onion and pressing the cut face against a grater or scraping it with a spoon. Grating a peeled onion on a microplane and using the liquid that collects gives the same thing; a few drops is just that -- three or four.
- Ground mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Sifting it in prevents lumps that never dissolve.
- Hot vinegarPlain cider vinegar is the likely intent. Heating it before it goes into the yolks keeps the mixture moving toward thickening rather than stalling, but add it in a slow stream or it will scramble the eggs on contact.
- YieldHalf a head of cabbage and this quantity of dressing serves four to six as a side dish. It is meant to be eaten warm and does not keep or reheat well once dressed.
American cookbooks of the nineteenth century routinely distinguished cold slaw from hot slaw, and the word "slaw" is generally traced to Dutch sla, a shortening of salade, with "cole" from kool, cabbage — the resemblance between "cole" and "cold" being why "cole slaw" is so often misheard and respelled as "cold slaw." The dressing here is a classic boiled dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, butter and dry mustard thickened over water — which was the standard household salad sauce before commercial mayonnaise became cheap and shelf-stable in the 1910s and 1920s. Cabbage was one of the few vegetables a northern household could count on from the root cellar late in the year, and serving it hot with a rich, sharp sauce made a winter staple feel like a cooked dish rather than a salad.