Kole Slaw
Shred half a head of cabbage very fine. Soak in cold, acidulated water to cover (add one tablespoon vinegar to one quart water). Drain and mix thoroughly with Cream Dressing. (See Page 50.) Chill and serve in lemon cups arranged in nests of cress or parsley.
A straightforward slaw whose only real technique is the acidulated soak; the rest is dressing and presentation.
- The acid soak is the pointOne tablespoon of vinegar to a quart of cold water keeps the cut edges from browning and crisps the shreds. The recipe gives no time; half an hour or so is enough, and a very long soak will waterlog the cabbage.
- Drain properlyThe recipe says drain, but any water left clinging will thin the dressing into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl. Spin it or press it in a towel before dressing.
- Shred fineThe recipe asks for 'very fine', finer than the coarse supermarket shred: a sharp knife on a halved, cored quarter, or the thin blade of a mandoline.
- Cream DressingThe cross-reference is to a dressing not reproduced here; cream dressings of the period were variously uncooked (cream, vinegar, sugar, salt) or cooked custard-style with egg yolk and mustard. Any modern slaw dressing works; plain mayonnaise thinned with cream and a spoonful of vinegar is the nearest shortcut.
- Half a headHead sizes vary; assume roughly 1 to 1.5 lb of cabbage, giving about 6 cups shredded. The recipe gives no yield, but that is enough for about six as a side.
- Lemon cupsHalve lemons crosswise, juice them, and scrape the membranes out to leave a shell; a thin slice off the base keeps them upright. They can be made ahead and kept cold.
- Dress lateSalt and acid pull water from cabbage steadily. The recipe dresses first and then chills; if you want it crisper, chill the cabbage and dressing separately and combine shortly before serving.
The spelling here — kole slaw — is one of many nineteenth-century attempts at the Dutch koolsla, literally cabbage salad, brought to America by Dutch settlers and generally traced to the Hudson Valley. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks print it as cold slaw, cole slaw, kohl slaw and kole slaw more or less interchangeably, the "cold" versions reflecting a folk reading of a word nobody could place. What marks this as a turn-of-the-century company recipe rather than a plain family one is the finish: creamed, chilled, spooned into hollowed lemon halves and set in cress. Serving salads in edible or ornamental containers was a staple of the era's entertaining manuals, and a book organised as fifty-two Sunday dinners is precisely where that kind of trouble would be taken.