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Salad for Cabbage
Two tablespoons sweet oil, butter or cream, one half tablespoon mustard; rub them together with a teaspoon salt, two eggs beaten very light; add to the above, six tablespoons vinegar and two of sugar, mix well together, put in an earthen stew pan, put over the fire and stir constantly with a wooden spoon until it is of the consistency of thick cream; strain and put away to cool. One-half cabbage.
This is a boiled dressing — the standard American salad sauce before bottled mayonnaise — and the whole thing hinges on cooking the eggs gently enough that they thicken rather than scramble.
- Low, patient heatCooked directly over a burner the eggs will curdle in seconds. Use a double boiler or a heavy pan over the lowest possible flame, stirring without stopping until it coats the spoon; the straining step at the end would catch any bits that do set.
- Sweet oil"Sweet oil" means olive oil — mild and fresh rather than sweetened. Two tablespoons of butter or cream is an equal substitute, as the recipe says, and cream gives the softest result.
- MustardHalf a tablespoon of dry mustard powder, rubbed into the fat to disperse it. Prepared mustard from a jar carries its own vinegar and salt and will throw the balance off.
- Earthen stew panA glazed earthenware pot, used because vinegar attacks bare iron and tin. Stainless steel, enamelled cast iron or glass does the same job; avoid unlined copper or aluminium.
- Vinegar strengthSix tablespoons of vinegar to two of sugar is sharp by modern taste, and household vinegar of the period was not standardised, so its strength varied. Taste once cooled and add sugar if it bites.
- Yield and servingEnough to dress half a medium cabbage, finely shredded. Dress it shortly before serving; the salt draws water out of the cabbage and thins the sauce if it stands.
- KeepingThe dressing is cooked but egg-based. Cover and refrigerate, and use within two or three days rather than "putting away to cool" in a larder as the original assumed.
Boiled dressing of this kind was a common feature of the American supper table through the nineteenth century, and cabbage was its natural partner: a cheap, storable vegetable available all winter, sturdy enough to stand up to a hot, acid sauce. Uncooked mayonnaise demanded good oil, cold conditions and a strong arm, while a cooked dressing thickened reliably with eggs and could be made ahead and kept in the cellar hem give a version of it, often under the name "cream dressing" or "boiled salad dressing." Its descendant is the sweet-sour cooked dressing still used in Pennsylvania Dutch coleslaw and in old-style potato salad, and the commercial salad dressings that displaced it in the twentieth century were built on the same profile of vinegar, sugar, mustard and egg.