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Dressing for Cabbage
One cup cream, one-half cup vinegar, two tablespoons sugar, two teaspoons mustard, one teaspoon salt.
A five-ingredient uncooked slaw dressing of the type that preceded bottled mayonnaise. The whole thing is decided by what you understand "cream" and "mustard" to mean.
- The hinge: acid plus creamHalf a cup of vinegar to one cup of cream will thicken and may curdle on contact. Whisk the vinegar in slowly at the end, with everything cold, and the mixture is more likely to stay smooth and pourable. Dumping it in at once risks a broken, grainy dressing.
- What "cream" meantIn a period household this would have been thick unpasteurized cream skimmed from the pan, sometimes slightly soured, and probably closer to today's heavy cream than to half-and-half. Use heavy cream, or sour cream thinned with a little milk, for a texture nearer the likely original.
- Mustard"Mustard" here most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add more vinegar and dilute the dressing; if it is all you have, use about double the volume and cut the vinegar back.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was variable in strength, and not reliably comparable to the standardized 5 percent acidity sold now. Start with a third of a cup, taste, and add the rest only if the dressing needs it.
- Dissolve the dry goods firstWhisk the sugar, mustard and salt into the vinegar before it meets the cream. Mustard powder and salt disperse badly in fat and will otherwise sit in gritty pockets.
- Yield and dressing the cabbageAbout a cup and a half, which should dress a large head of cabbage shredded fine. Toss it on shortly before serving; the salt and acid draw water from the cabbage and the slaw goes slack within an hour.
- Seasoning to modern tasteOne teaspoon of salt in this quantity is on the assertive side by current habit. Both salt and sugar are easily adjusted at the end.
Cream-and-vinegar dressings like this one are often associated with the era before commercial mayonnaise reached American groceries, when a cook wanting to dress cabbage either boiled a cooked dressing with eggs and butter or, more quickly, stirred vinegar, sugar and mustard into whatever cream the household had on hand. The uncooked version is the country cousin: no eggs, no double boiler, no risk of curdling over heat. Sweet-sour cream dressings for cabbage are generally traced to German-speaking settlement in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, where the same combination turns up on cucumbers, wilted lettuce and potatoes, and where the cabbage patch and the milk pan were both close to the kitchen door.