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New Cabbage Salad
Mix two cups of new cabbage, finely shredded, with one-half cup of celery cut in small pieces and one mild onion finely chopped. Add one-half tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce to one cup of boiled salad dressing and mix thoroughly with cabbage. Chill. Serve in onion cups or in nests of crisp lettuce leaves.
A slaw of the boiled-dressing era, when mayonnaise was a rarity in home kitchens and cooked dressings did the work. Nothing here is difficult; the two things to settle before starting are the dressing and the onion cups.
- Boiled salad dressingThis is the cooked dressing of the period: milk or cream thickened with egg and flour, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, cooled before use. It is tangier and looser than mayonnaise. If you are not making one, a cup of mayonnaise thinned with a tablespoon or two of cider vinegar and a teaspoon of dry mustard is the closest ready substitute.
- "New cabbage"Early-summer cabbage, loose-headed, pale and thin-leaved. A young green cabbage works; the dense winter storage heads are tougher and want either finer shredding or a brief salting.
- Onion cupsPresumably large mild onions with the centres pushed out to leave a shell; the recipe gives no method, and softening them briefly first makes them pliable enough to hold. Rarely done now, and the lettuce nests are the easier of the two options given.
- ShreddingFinely shredded means about an eighth of an inch, cut across the grain of the leaf. A knife gives a cleaner result than a box grater, which bruises the cabbage and releases sulphurous liquid.
- The onion in the saladOne whole mild onion, finely chopped, is a lot for two cups of cabbage by modern taste. A small sweet onion or half a large one, or a few sliced scallions, keeps the balance.
- ChillingHalf an hour is enough to firm the dressing and take the raw edge off the onion. Longer than a couple of hours and the salt in the dressing draws water from the cabbage, leaving a thin puddle and limp shreds.
- YieldRoughly four cups of dressed salad, which serves four as a side dish.
Cabbage was the salad vegetable that kept, and cooked or "boiled" dressings were the standard binder in American households before commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the 1910s and 20s: a custard-like sauce of egg, flour or cornstarch, milk, vinegar and mustard that could be made from pantry staples without a steady arm or a bowl of oil. The Worcestershire is a period signature, a bottled sauce that turns up throughout early twentieth-century American cookery as an all-purpose savoury lift. Serving a salad in a hollowed onion or a "nest" of lettuce belongs to the same moment, when cooking-school teachers pressed home cooks toward composed, individually plated dishes rather than a bowl passed at table. 52 Sunday Dinners is arranged by week and by season, so each dish sits in the part of the year its ingredients belong to.