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Cabbage Salad (Put the milk and vinegar)
Put the milk and vinegar on to heat in separate sauce-pans; when the vinegar boils, add butter, sugar, salt and pepper, and stir in the chopped cabbage; cover, and let scald and steam-not boil-for a moment, meanwhile, remove hot milk from stove, cool a little, and stir in the well-beaten and strained yolks; return to stove, and boil a moment. Dish cabbage and pour custard over it, stir rapidly with a silver spoon until well mixed, and set immediately in a cold place.
This is a cooked-dressing slaw of the pre-mayonnaise era, printed as one of several cabbage salads in the section and relying on an ingredient list the reader was expected to carry over from the preceding recipes.
- No quantities are givenThe text as printed lists no amounts for milk, vinegar, butter, sugar, yolks or cabbage. Cooked dressings of this type in the period generally run to about a cup of milk, half a cup of vinegar, three or four yolks, a tablespoon of butter and a spoonful each of sugar and salt for a medium head of cabbage, but that is a reconstruction from the genre, not from this page.
- Why milk and vinegar go in separate pansThis is the hinge of the recipe. Acid poured into hot milk curdles it instantly; the vinegar cooks the cabbage on its own, and the milk is enriched with yolks and only meets the acid at the end, off the heat and quickly stirred, when the custard has enough body to hold.
- "Boil a moment" is not a boilAn egg custard sets at roughly 175-180F and scrambles above about 185F. Cook the yolk-and-milk mixture over low heat, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon, then take it off.
- Straining the yolksPushing beaten yolks through a sieve removes the chalazae, the white cords at either end of the yolk, which otherwise cook into visible threads in a thin custard. It is worth doing.
- Scald, do not boil, the cabbageOne to two minutes covered in the boiling vinegar is enough for finely shredded cabbage. Longer and it slumps and turns sulfurous; the dish depends on the shreds keeping some bite under the dressing.
- The silver spoonSulfur compounds in egg yolk tarnish silver, so a silver spoon will darken here. Stainless steel or wood does the same job. The instruction survives from a time when the alternative was likely to be iron or tin, which would have discolored the dressing.
- Setting it in a cold placeA cellar or larder in 1877; the refrigerator now. This is a custard-dressed salad and should be chilled promptly and eaten the same day.
- YieldThe recipe gives no amounts; on the reconstructed quantities above, it would serve about six to eight as a side.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Ohio, 1877) was assembled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from recipes contributed by many hands. Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this were the standard American salad sauce before jarred mayonnaise became a grocery item in the twentieth century: eggs, vinegar, a little sugar and butter, thickened over heat, cheaper and steadier in a warm kitchen than an emulsion of raw yolk and oil. The hot-vinegar treatment of the cabbage may owe something to the German settlement of the Ohio Valley, where warm slaws dressed with vinegar and bacon fat were known, though the milk-and-yolk custard here is closer to the New England boiled dressing than to anything Krautsalat.