Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Cabbage Salad
Cabbage Salad
Shave 2 cups shredded cabbage in thin strips or chop fine and mix with the following dressing: 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup hot vinegar, 1 teaspoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper, 1/2 onion, cut fine, and 1/2 cup sweet or sour cream, milk or water. Dissolve the sugar in cream. Mix with rest of the ingredients. Mix while hot and serve with the salad slightly warmed.
A hot boiled-style slaw dressing, of the German-American type, built here on Crisco because the book was written to sell it. Two things govern the result: the dressing must go on hot, and the cabbage must be cut fine.
- The hinge: serve it warmCrisco is solid at room temperature, so a dressing made with it turns waxy and dull the moment it cools on cold cabbage. Warm the shredded cabbage slightly, dress it hot, and eat it within a few minutes. A neutral oil or bacon fat avoids the problem entirely and gives a better mouthfeel.
- Crisco, in 1915Crisco -- Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, launched not long before this book, and the volume exists largely to demonstrate it. Two tablespoons of any bland fat does the same job; bacon drippings are the traditional choice for a hot slaw dressing and are worth using here.
- "Sweet or sour cream, milk or water"Sweet cream means plain unsoured cream. The four options are not equivalent: cream gives a rich, clinging dressing, water gives a sharp, almost pickled one. Modern cultured sour cream will curdle visibly if stirred into boiling vinegar, so let the vinegar cool a little first or temper the cream with a spoonful of it.
- Hot vinegarHalf a cup of vinegar to half a cup of dairy is assertive by current standards. Taste and cut the vinegar with water if it bites.
- Dissolving the sugarA tablespoon of sugar will not dissolve readily in cold cream. Warm the cream gently or dissolve the sugar in the hot vinegar instead, then combine.
- OnionHalf an onion cut fine is a lot of raw onion for two cups of cabbage. Grate it or mince it very small, or reduce to a quarter and let the hot dressing take the edge off it.
- YieldTwo cups of shredded cabbage is roughly a quarter of a small head and serves two to three as a side. The dressing quantity is generous; expect leftovers, and rewarm them rather than using them cold.
Hot vinegar-and-fat slaws of this kind came into American cookbooks through German and Pennsylvania Dutch households, where cabbage dressed with warm bacon fat and vinegar was standard winter fare, apparently well before it was commonly called a "salad" in print. What marks this version as modern for its moment is the fat: the recipe belongs to a promotional cookbook built around Crisco, the hydrogenated shortening introduced in the 1910s and pushed hard as a clean, odorless, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter. Books like this one were distributed to demonstrate that the new product could stand in anywhere a traditional fat had been used, salads included, which is why a dish more usually associated with bacon drippings appears here recast in vegetable shortening.