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Southern Cabbage
Chop or slice one medium-sized cabbage fine, put it in a stewpan with boiling water to well cover it, and boil fifteen minutes; drain off all water, and add a dressing made as follows: Half teacup wine-vinegar, two-thirds as much sugar, salt, pepper, half teaspoon mustard, and two tea-spoons salad oil; when this is boiling hot, add one tea-cup cream, and one egg stirred together; mix thoroughly and immediately with the cabbage, and cook a moment.
A hot boiled dressing poured over drained cabbage — the same sweet-sour-cream formula that shows up in Pennsylvania and Ohio kitchens under a dozen names. Two things need attention: the cabbage is boiled far longer than anyone would boil it now, and the egg-and-cream finish will scramble if it is not handled carefully.
- The hinge: the egg goes in off the boilThe dressing is described as "boiling hot" when the cream and egg are added, which risks curdling it. Safer to take the vinegar mixture off the heat, whisk a little of it into the beaten egg and cream to temper, then return everything to low heat and stir until it thickens slightly. It should not boil again.
- Teacup and half teacupA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, commonly somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup; take it at about 3/4 cup and you get roughly 6 tablespoons of vinegar, about 1/4 cup sugar, and 3/4 cup cream.
- Fifteen minutes is too longBoiled a quarter of an hour, shredded cabbage collapses into grey strings and smells of sulphur. Five to seven minutes in well-salted water gives tender cabbage that still holds its shape; drain it thoroughly, or the dressing will be watered down.
- Wine-vinegarVinegar strength varied a good deal before standardised bottling, so the sharpness here is unpredictable. Taste the dressing before it goes on the cabbage and adjust the sugar; the balance should be pronounced but not puckering.
- Salad oilThis means a mild table oil, most often olive, though cottonseed and other bland oils were sold for the purpose by this date. Any neutral oil works, and two teaspoons is genuinely all that is called for.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, which is how the measure would have been understood.
- Yield and servingOne medium cabbage feeds four to six as a side dish. It is meant to go to the table hot, immediately; the dressing tightens and dulls as it sits, and reheating tends to split it.
Despite the name, this is a Northern book's idea of Southern cooking — Buckeye Cookery was compiled and published in Ohio in 1877 from contributed household receipts, and regional labels in such collections often signal nothing more than the state the contributor came from or claimed the dish for. The technique itself is squarely Middle American: a hot sweet-sour boiled dressing thickened with egg and cream, the same construction that dresses wilted lettuce, hot slaw and potato salad across the German-settled belt from Pennsylvania through Ohio into the Midwest, and generally traced to Pennsylvania Dutch practice. Cabbage earned its place in these books by keeping — a head would hold in a cool cellar through the winter when little else green would — and dressings like this one, heavy on vinegar and sugar, were the standard way of making a long-stored vegetable taste like something.