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Cold Slaw
Cut 2 cabbages very fine and put it in salad bowl. Boil 2 tablespoons vinegar. Beat up 2 eggs, add 1/2 cup sour cream, 2 tablespoons Crisco and add them to boiled vinegar. Stir over fire till boiling, and 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper, pour over cabbage, and it is ready to serve when very cold.
A boiled-dressing slaw of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise in American kitchens. The dressing is the whole job; the cabbage only needs to be cut fine.
- The hinge: keep the custard movingEggs, sour cream and fat in hot vinegar will curdle if left to sit on direct heat. Stir constantly over medium-low heat and pull the pan the moment it thickens and blows a bubble or two; a whisk and a heavy-bottomed pan are worth more here than any timing.
- CriscoCrisco was new hydrogenated vegetable shortening when this book was written and is being advertised here. Two tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil does the same work in the dressing, with better flavour.
- The dressing is scant as writtenTwo tablespoons of vinegar and half a cup of sour cream will barely coat two whole cabbages. Either treat this as dressing for one medium head, or multiply the dressing by three or four for the full quantity.
- Cabbage sizeCabbages commonly run 2-3 lb, so two of them is roughly 5 lb of shredded cabbage, five or six quarts loose, which is a party-sized bowl.
- Sour creamCream of this period would generally have been soured naturally rather than cultured to a set standard, and was likely thinner and sharper than today's product. Modern full-fat sour cream works; low-fat versions are more likely to break when heated.
- Salt the cabbage firstThe original pours dressing straight onto raw cabbage. Tossing the shred with a teaspoon of salt, letting it drain 30 minutes and squeezing it dry keeps the finished slaw from watering down in the bowl.
- ServingThe recipe wants it "very cold," so give it a couple of hours chilled; the dressing tightens and the cabbage softens slightly. Dressed slaw of this type keeps two or three days refrigerated.
"Cold slaw" is an English mishearing of the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, carried into American usage through New York and long enough established that nineteenth-century cooks also wrote "hot slaw" for the warmed version. The dressing here is a boiled or cooked dressing, an egg-thickened vinegar sauce that was the standard American salad dressing before commercial mayonnaise became cheap; it keeps better than an emulsion of raw yolk and oil, which mattered in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which explains why shortening turns up in a salad dressing where an earlier cookbook would have written butter.