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Salad, German
Throw a pound of sauer kraut into boiling water, and let it remain for five minutes; drain and cool it. Put the same weight of red pickled cabbage into cold water. Drain it, and shred finely with the sauer kraut. Mix the two thoroughly, and add one ounce of grated horse-radish, one table-spoonful of chopped chervil, and two half-boiled onions finely minced. Just before serving the salad, toss the whole lightly together with six table-spoonfuls of oil, a table-spoonful of vinegar, and a little pepper and salt.
A cold cabbage salad built from two already-soured ingredients, which explains a dressing that looks strangely short on vinegar. Everything can be prepped hours ahead; only the dressing is last-minute.
- The dressing ratio is deliberateThe dressing is short on acid -- six tablespoons oil to one of vinegar is far leaner in acid than a modern vinaigrette, and the sauerkraut and the pickled cabbage both arrive sharp already. Dress and taste before adding more vinegar; the salad may well need none.
- Blanching the sauerkrautFive minutes in boiling water pulls out the harshest brine and softens the raw ferment smell. Drain hard, then cool it properly and squeeze dry, or the dressing will slide off and pool.
- Red pickled cabbageAlmost certainly the British-style cabbage pickled in spiced vinegar, sold in jars near the pickled onions, rather than the sweet German Rotkohl braised with apple. If you can only find the sweet braised kind, the salad will taste jammy; a jar of sharp pickled red cabbage is the closer match.
- Half-boiled onionsParboil the onions only until the raw bite is gone but they are still firm at the centre, then cool and mince. Fully soft onion turns to mush when tossed.
- HorseradishAn ounce of freshly grated root is a couple of tablespoons or so and is considerably fiercer than the jarred product. If using prepared horseradish, drain it and start with half, since it carries its own vinegar, and creamed versions their own dairy.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Flat-leaf parsley with a few fennel or tarragon fronds gives the nearest anise-edged result; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
- Timing and yieldTwo pounds of cabbage dresses six to eight as a side. Toss only at the table — once dressed, the shreds weep and the salad goes slack within the hour.
The salad is labelled "German" chiefly because of the sauerkraut, which in Victorian Britain tended to be read as the characteristic ingredient of Germany. Fermented cabbage was cheap and kept through winter without ice, and it appears in British books largely as an accompaniment to pork or as a foreign curiosity. Using it cold, shredded and oiled is not a British invention: cabbage salads dressed with oil, vinegar and grated horseradish were winter food across central Europe. The pairing with pickled red cabbage looks like a British inflection -- that jar was a familiar item on the Victorian cold table -- and chervil belongs to the French-trained vocabulary that colours much of the book. The result reads less as an authentic regional dish than as a Victorian idea of one, assembled from ingredients a London household could actually buy.