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Red Cabbage, Celery and Onion Salad
Select a small, solid head of red cabbage; remove the wilted leaves. Cut in quarters and cut out the tough stalk and the coarse ribs of the leaves. Cover with cold water and let soak until cabbage is crisp; drain, then shave in thin shreds, and mix with the hearts of two or three heads (according to their size) of crisp celery, cut in small pieces crosswise. Add one medium-sized Spanish onion, finely chopped, and dress with Boiled Salad Dressing. Serve in lettuce heart leaves or in nests of cress.
A straightforward winter slaw that depends almost entirely on the crispness of the vegetables and the dressing you pair it with. Two things need translating: the cross-reference to Boiled Salad Dressing, and the sheer quantity of raw onion.
- Boiled Salad DressingThis is the cooked dressing common in American cookbooks of the period: egg, vinegar, sugar, mustard and milk or cream, stirred over heat until it coats a spoon, then chilled; many versions also carry a little flour or cornstarch. It is tangy and creamy rather than oily, which suits shredded cabbage better than a thin vinaigrette. A modern buttermilk or mayonnaise-based slaw dressing works if you have no boiled dressing on hand.
- Soak the cabbage, and mean itThe cold-water soak is the hinge of the recipe: it firms up leaves that have gone limp, so they snap instead of bending. The recipe gives no time, only 'until cabbage is crisp' — allow a good while. Drain thoroughly and pat dry, or the water will thin the dressing.
- Shave, do not chop"Thin shreds" means paper-thin. A mandoline or the thinnest setting on a food processor slicing disc gives a better texture than a knife, and thin shreds take dressing more evenly.
- Spanish onionThen as now, a large mild yellow onion. A sweet onion (Vidalia, Walla Walla) or a red onion is closer to the intended mildness than a standard cooking onion. One medium onion, finely chopped, is still a lot of raw onion by current taste; start with half and add to suit.
- Celery heartsTwo or three heads of celery yield only the pale inner ribs and leaves once the outer stalks are stripped away. Reserve the outer ribs for stock. The recipe leaves the count to the size of the heads, so with large modern celery two may be plenty.
- Colour bleedsRed cabbage stains everything it touches purple, and the acid in the dressing turns it brighter pink. Dress the salad shortly before serving if you want the celery to stay white.
- YieldA small head of red cabbage plus two celery hearts should serve roughly six as a side salad, though the recipe gives no yield. It holds a day in the refrigerator, though it loses crispness.
- ServingThe lettuce-heart cups or nest of cress are doing the work of a plate. Butter or Bibb lettuce cups hold the salad best; cress adds a peppery edge that suits the boiled dressing.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was built around the problem of feeding a family a respectable Sunday meal from what the market actually had that week, and one of its salads shows the constraint plainly: cabbage, celery and onion are all storage or late-season crops, available when lettuce and tomatoes were not. Red cabbage keeps for months in a cold cellar, which is why it appears in so many winter and early-spring salads of the period. The boiled dressing the recipe calls for belongs to the same economy: made with milk, egg and flour rather than a cup of olive oil, it was cheaper than mayonnaise. Serving a salad in a lettuce cup or a ring of cress was a common American table convention of the era, and it made a small quantity of vegetables look like a composed course.