Cream Slaw
One gallon cabbage cut very fine, pint vinegar, pint sour cream, half cup sugar, tea-spoon flour, two eggs, and a piece of butter the size of a walnut; put vinegar, sugar and butter in a sauce-pan and let boil; stir eggs, cream and flour, previously well mixed, into the vinegar, boil thoroughly and throw over the cabbage previously sprinkled with one table-spoon salt, one of black pepper and one of mustard.-Mrs. Dr. Skinner, Somerset, Ohio.
A cooked boiled dressing of the kind that preceded bottled mayonnaise, poured hot over shredded cabbage. It works, but the quantities are for a farmhouse table and the seasoning is stated in tablespoons.
- The hinge: temper the eggsThe eggs, cream and flour go into boiling vinegar, which will scramble them if dumped in at once. Whisk a ladle of the hot vinegar into the egg mixture first, then return everything to the pan and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon.
- Scale and yieldA gallon of finely cut cabbage is roughly one large head, about 2.5 to 3 lb trimmed, and the finished bowl serves 12 to 16. Halving the whole recipe is straightforward.
- Walnut of butterAbout 1 tablespoon. Nineteenth-century books often gave butter in comparative sizes, a walnut or an egg being the commonest.
- Sour cream then and nowIn 1877 this meant raw cream left to sour naturally: thinner and sharper than tubbed commercial sour cream. Modern cultured sour cream thinned with a spoonful or two of buttermilk is closer in body.
- A pint of vinegar is a lotThat is 2 cups against half a cup of sugar, and home-made cider vinegar of the period was not standardised, so its strength may have differed from today's 5 percent. Start with a cup of vinegar and a quarter cup of water, and taste before committing to the full amount.
- Pepper and mustardA tablespoon each is aggressive by current taste, and the mustard means dry powder, not prepared. A teaspoon of each, adjusted upward, is a safer starting point; the salt at a tablespoon is about right for this volume of cabbage.
- Salting the cabbageSalt draws water out, so the slaw loosens as it stands. Either dress it shortly before serving or salt the cabbage 20 minutes ahead and squeeze it out, then reduce the salt in the seasoning.
- Serving temperatureThe dressing goes on hot, which wilts the cabbage slightly. Chilling the assembled slaw for an hour lets the dressing set and the flavors settle.
Cream slaw belongs to the family of cooked, or boiled, salad dressings that were widely used on American tables before commercial mayonnaise reached grocery shelves in the early twentieth century: vinegar, sugar, egg and a little flour, thickened over the fire and used hot on cabbage, potatoes or lettuce. The word slaw comes into English from the Dutch koolsla, cabbage salad, and is often said to have spread west through the Middle Atlantic and Ohio Valley with Dutch and German settlement. Its appearance here, credited to a contributor from Somerset in Perry County, reflects how Buckeye Cookery was assembled: as a compilation of dishes sent in by Ohio housewives, each recipe carrying a name and a town. The sour cream is the tell of a farm kitchen, where cream stood and soured as a matter of course and was cooked rather than wasted.